Old Bones Upon the Mountain Shake
by indiachick
Summary: The apocalypse happened, just not how the Winchesters expected. Sam is missing in the madness that follows. Dean doesn't remember where he went, or if he's even alive. There are zombies. Dean might be one of them, and he might be badass trying to overcome the situation. Hurt!Dean, hurt!Sam, hurt world. Please REVIEW!
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: This was originally started for a comment fic meme at hoodie_ time on livejournal and features zombie apocalypses and suchness. Also my first fic. Ever. **

**A/N updated: **I just learned to do proper author's notes. Yay! So this is a zombie!Dean fanfic, because I'm of the opinion that zombie!Dean will kick serious ass. To everyone who's been amazing and reviewed so far, THANK YOU. It's a great experience for a first SPN fic.

**Warnings: **Graphic violence, implied character deaths, unstable!Dean, extremely off-track interpretation of the Book of Revelations. And brain eating. Yeah. :D

**_Part 1_**

_The world wasn't always like this. _

_This happened only a week ago. Or a month._

_ Or maybe it's always been like this, really, always the same under the pretty gilded surface._

_Blood and glass and flesh and bone and hunger, hunger, hunger._

The Apocalypse has already blown through this town.

It's evident by the smoke, the smell, the half-a-dozen crucifixes sticking out from amidst what used to be neat rows of cookie-cutter houses. The carrion birds have gotten here before them; the sound of their wings carries through the air and reaches his ears even through the host of other things- _scents, feelings, colour- _competing for his attention. It's a sound that dismays him, dismays everyone, sends a crimson reel of hunger rapidly unspooling within his gut.

_Like dangling a fucking cheeseburger in my face and then replacing it with salad, _he thinks. Doesn't mean anything to him, those words. Not anymore, not with the world so raw and primal and sharp, not with the coppery taste of old blood still in his mouth, but he has them and they're in his head and they won't go away. They flutter like birds till he grabs them to the forefront of his consciousness and then they dissolve with a taste of ash, of old memories too faded now to matter.

_Trust me, _says his stomach. _Brain tastes much better._

He snorts.

(because he's a zombie with a humour sense, _some things just don't change)_

(and there it is, gents and ladies, another flash card, another useless SAT prep word, _zombie, Z-O-M-B-I-E)_

From somewhere: a cry.

The sound is _everything._ And when it starts moving—just a shadow, just a shadow right there, in the midst of that park with three bodies twisted around the jungle gym, half-bodies minus their heads, someone's leftovers— when it starts moving, the wind picks up its scent, and the whole world is dancing, blurring with that _smell _and it's _human_.

Human. Alive.

Food.

The first moment is confusion, always confusion, always figuring out that he is not rooted to the ground, he has _legs_, legs are for moving, he has to move, eat.

The second is the realization that this is a competition—his pack is moving, snarling, foaming, a tangle of limbs, a wild dance of snapping teeth and tearing flesh.

There are maybe twenty of them.

He grabs for a woman with filthy, matted blond hair, twists her neck and feels her bones snap, and she's screeching and kicking while he goes for another one, a man, ripping his head straight off while the woman sinks her teeth into his hand. He snarls and pushes her, blindly shoves her into another person- _zombie, _whatever- and goes down on his knees, because one of them has just climbed onto his back, teeth snapping and clacking near his neck, and he thinks—thinks for a moment with such frightening clarity that it nearly blinds him—_damn it, you son of a bitch, that's MY meal._

And he hurls the zombie off him—the thud is sickening, that one was barely put-together, all strings of meat on yellowing bones—and then he's running.

The moon is pink and the sky is red and he never notices because hunger is what matters.

There's a man protecting the girl and they're hiding in an abandoned gas station.

Four of them splash through the puddles, moaning at the prospect of food, blinded by hunger and get shot through their foreheads. The birds overhead scatter with mutinous cawing, dropping whatever meat they'd been pecking on like grotesque rain, but he's not interested in scraps.

He waits. Waits for the silence to fall, for any shuffling zombies to stop, process the shots, keep processing the new information while standing there like trees, drooling, waiting for the next wind, the next batch of _eu de Homo _to hit them. But he's here, waiting for the man and girl to come out.

See. Smarter than your average zombie.

(and this next thing he does is only going to make him smarter, _sharper,_ make him _remember_ things)

He waits. Knows that they HAVE to come out.

And come out they do. Silently, the man holding a hand over the girl's mouth, the girl's frightened eyes swan-black and darting everywhere.

"Watch out," he hears the man say, the words elongating and distorting into a harmony of odd consonants and odder vowels, losing shape in his mind, "don't step on the puddles...infected...the virus..."

And then the man stops, sees him, freezes.

He hears a familiar sound, a click, and has another flash of clarity (_a gun, that's a gun being loaded) _and then the man is lowering his gun (stupid, _stupid _is what they all die of), squinting into the shadows, saying, "You're that hunter kid, right? Winchester?"

And then the world is blurring because he's moving too fast.

_The last radio station on earth broadcasts from a farm in Iowa._

_The radio jockey is manically cheerful and has two catchphrases he uses at least twice every thirty minutes. "They eat us alive, bitches" is one. "FUBAR is our middle name now" is the other._

_He keeps playing evangelical songs, as if maybe God will tune in. _

_It's not like God's gonna have to choose between stations anyway._

What he knows is this.

A day ago, or maybe a week, or maybe it's a year— who was keeping tabs anymore?—he didn't know things about guns, nor words, nor _anything._ No name, no aim, no consciousness.

It was just days upon days of wandering. One town, then another. Everywhere they conquered, they meshed together telephone poles, electric posts, made wonky crucifixes, tied bodies to them like, _see- we got here first and we ate all the dessert._

Those were the days of no words. Absolutely no words.

There was an endless chasm where his brain was, and there were things in the chasm screaming for food. And so he fed it. And with each feeding, the chasm became smaller, smaller—a gulf now, a crack, just a gap— and through the gap sometimes coherent stuff got out, words like _monster _and _wrong _and _zombie_. And he was fine with the words, words were good, words made him stronger and smarter than the others, _if only _it were ALL words, just words and no emotions.

He's not even done with the girl before it hits him—like a fucking truck full of fucking concrete—_that's a human girl, dude, and you're chewing on her brain—_

And it's gone again, gone in a second like lightning, but he's up and shuffling away, wondering where's he's going, why he's going wherever the fuck he's going, what's up with all the monster birds swooping to scavenge all he's left behind.

Other things are slipping through too—this from the man, the man who smelled of sweat and gunpowder and faintly of gasoline—other things about people with too many guns and hard-edged gazes and brittle grips on sanity, and the name: the name _Winchester. _

_Like the rifle, _a memory chimes in. He's leaning over a counter in some other life, the dead man is standing in front of him cleaning a gun, his name so vague (_Klaus? Carl?) _and he's saying the words: _Winchester. Like the rifle?_

_Yeah, _he tells dead-man-Klaus-or-Carl.

(he's smiling, he's shaking hands, hullo, hullo)

_I'm Dean..._

(so this is a memory, and memories come from brains, brains are good for memories)

..._this is..._

(he's pushing someone else towards the counter, smacking the back of their head to make them look up from a thick leather journal)

..._I'm Dean and this is..._

Two shots ring out into the silence— awful, loud, everything is so loud in this world— and he's so slow, food makes them all slow, but he twists off the road and into the woods, slipping on black blood, stumbling, falling, sliding down a slope. Twigs and sticks and stones and branches and centuries, centuries later, he slides to a stop and just lies there.

There's no pain, though both bullets (_bullets, _know what a _bullet_ is now, what a frigging genius) are lodged somewhere in his body. One in his leg, because his calf is a geyser of blood. The other in his hip, and when he stands, he has to walk funny to get anywhere.

..._we gotta sew that up...blood poisoning, septicaemia, you could _die_, Dean..._

_ Shut up, _he tells the voice in his head.

_The tabloids, before they stopped circulating because zombies didn't remember how to write, called it The Lure._

_The Undead wandered everywhere, feeding and infecting and feeding again, but like a group of cannibal trucks set to fucking auto drive or something they inevitably followed The Lure._

_Maybe they were looking for something ._

_Or maybe something was looking for them._

* * *

**_A/N part two: _**This is basically a mystery story, so if it looks like it's starting from nowhere, that's intentional :D Please stick with me through the first few chapters and I hope you enjoy! I'm indiachick on livejournal if you wanna friend me or talk to me :)


	2. Chapter 2

_Let's go back and build something big and beautiful and then break it into the jagged pieces that you see around now._

_The first layer is civilization, all blue skies and yellow sun, painted like a child's bedroom, so innocent that it breaks at the first signs of stress. You peel that open, wipe the last of the shreds from your fingernails, and you're staring at sanity. _

_Sanity doesn't have any color, see, because you were never meant to see it beneath the pretty packaging you just tore. But then that peels away also, and what is left is humanity. _

_That little bitch, held down and branded and changed till it stands up again, staring and hungry, emaciated of all thought, all reasoning._

_You'd think the layers would end there, but you can peel open what's left of humanity too._

_And that nameless black thing within is what you are now._

He gets the bullets out.

Seems strange, in retrospective, why he should even bother.

It's not like he's going to bleed to death.

(though he _has _been bleeding, black blood like ink, a wordless trail to a forgotten story)

It's also extremely hard focusing, when the rain is pouring so hard that the edges of the world are blurring, and when it stops even for a minute it gets warm, steam-rising-off-the-ground warm, and everything is freaky green like a tropical paradise.

Around him, the woods are alive with warm sounds and scurrying creatures. He can smell them all. It's like they all fart the rainbow pixie dust that screams, "I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm edible," and Dean has to growl and think up long forgotten swear words just to protest at the total unfairness of life (_death, undeath, whatever) _in leaving him with a bullet that slows him down to the extent that even dead rabbits laugh at him.

_(and that's why the bullets have got to come out, a man's gotta eat)_

It's not easy to remember, but he's remembering a lot now. Procedures. _Cut. Find the bullet. Stitch._ He doesn't bother much with antiseptic- there was none in the dispensary he shuffled into anyway- but he has a few other things, things that take forever to register in his brain and swim up to the surface with a label attached to them. _Bandage, sutures, tweezers. _They all sit by his feet and tease. _You're doing it wrong, pick me instead. _He glares at them but they don't shut up, just like the voice in his head never, _ever_ shuts up.

_Where are you? _It keeps asking. _What are you doing? There are things you have to do. _

_Remember. Remember?_

The man- Klaus or Carl, whatever- the man whose memories now swirl in his head had called him Winchester, he was Dean Winchester, he remembers telling him "I'm Dean, and this is..." and he knows he's supposed to remember the rest of that, remember the _person _occupying the end of that sentence, but it hurts his head— and what does it matter, anyway?

_Please, _says the voice. _You have to remember. Trust me._

The Voice wasn't there before that hunter and the girl, and he doesn't know if the two are connected somehow.

Before them it was always a highway to some new place, an asphalt road twisting like a black ribbon towards a dawning orange sun, and him on the road travelled by the aimless. Finding groups, finding food, one town after another.

Now here he is, half-remembering, half wanting to forget and be lost in a blissful wave of nothing but primordial urges.

_Trust me, _says the Voice.

He's been to this town before, he's almost certain. That church looks familiar. He doesn't remember _why_ he was here, doesn't even remember if it had been years and years ago or as soon as last week, but that church steeple and the neat narrow steps that leads up to its mahogany double doors stops him in his tracks. There are little flyers taped to the door and even from here, he can see the men on them, their wings fluffy and white and large like overgrown albatrosses.

_Ass-monkeys with wings,_ he thinks disjointedly.

The rain is still coming down, laden with a weird, thick ash. It coats everything: the roof of the church, still bleeding red in strips where the grey hasn't completely smothered it; the broken houses on either side of the streets leading away from the church, the ground, the trees; everything. Every window is a lamprey's mouth of broken glass shards, and out of the trunk of a twisted shape that was probably once a car (still neatly parked) spills clothes, suitcases, photos. Bits of brightly colored plastic that must have been toys. A yellow bib.

One ash-covered shoe peeks from beneath the car.

Dean doesn't investigate.

Instead he walks—slow, wondering, still hungry—down the street and around it, to where a strip mall has been looted and torched and a cassette player still wails an upbeat country tune. It's surreal. There's nothing here. Nothing alive. He's bearing witness to a silent apocalypse. Just the wind, and the ash shifting. There is an ocean of it, a continent, and he wades through it. It sticks to his boots, slows him down even further, but when he tries to walk in the puddles of rainwater, there's something wrong with that too, things swimming in it, things with little pincers. They almost look like scorpions. Or locusts. And they don't seem to care if he bleeds red or black.

_(it's like one domino fell and now nothing's right, not even fucking rainwater)_

_How did this happen? _asks the Voice. _Think, Dean._

He walks around town. Draws up a list of the more disturbing things and is pleased that they disturb him. The rain never stops. It's just there, constant, white noise. Sometimes there's a disconcerting sound like wings, and sometimes the distant rumble of thunder but never any lightning, and when he looks up, the sky is the weirdest thing ever.

There's a hole in it. A rip.

Jagged, and white, with light streaming through it like heaven's floor has cracked. It's not gleaming, warm, end-of-the-tunnel light. More like Heaven's-really-lost-its-wattage.

Blank and white, it falls over the town like a sheet, giving everything a sick, gossamer shine.

The sad thing is that there are no stars. He used to like looking at stars, he thinks, but now they're gone, all of them, whole constellations disappearing amidst the Glow.

_(Someone's dug up a grave in the sky and this planet is the corpse they found.)_

From somewhere, he hears bells. Large cathedral bells, tolling and tolling, and then smaller bells join in, until the night is a cacophony of ringing, and all the birds pecking bones clean all over the town rise to the sky screaming, and he has no idea what's happening.

_Screw this._

"Hey!" he hears, and turns around.

Maybe it's the sickly scent of ash or the rain washing away his scent, but Dean didn't hear the boy sneak up on him and now the kid stands, ankle-deep in water, completely ignoring the black bugs swarming around his...his plastic-bag-encased legs. He must be as young as twenty, maybe younger, smokes a cigarette, has only two fingers on one hand. He also has a gun, strapped on his shoulder and pointing to the sky, like he's gonna shoot down angels through that messed-up sky-gash.

_( and fuck, as if Dean doesn't wanna see him try)_

"Hey." He says again, and the rain is a sheet between them, grey and blurring everything.

One of those black bugs crawl up the boy's chin and he plucks it away, throws it hard to the ground and steps on it, and even through the water the red chrysanthemum of it bleeding out is visible.

"You want a bite of this?" the kid sneers, meaning himself.

Dean thinks about this. The kid's hair is greasy, black, hangs in his eyes with the verve of a limp sack of potatoes. Every inch of his skin is coated with the ash. Definitely not particularly appetizing. Dean wants to shake his head, say _fuck, no, I don't swing that way _but the words aren't making it. Between that chasm between his thoughts and his mouth, they flail around helplessly and make suicidal swan dives into oblivion.

"_Patrick!" _he hears, and then a woman is storming out of a door, wide-eyed and gasping, grabbing at the boy's hand. "Get in! Get in, you heard the bells!"

Dean wonders why Seven-Fingered Patrick doesn't simply shoot him—the woman either, because she has a gun too, a big one— but it's not like he's going to be able to ask and he just watches while they disappear into the house. It used to be a nice house, he can tell, white-picket fence with a red roof and curtains at the windows, but now the roof-tiles are broken on the ground, and the inside of the windows are a yawning black teeming with Lovecraftian shadows.

It looks like death and silence and hopelessness, but at least the "death" part of it is neat, perfect artifice.

So this town is alive, after all. They've just learned to mask the signs better. Dean can't find a single crucifixion anywhere, and there are no zombies lurking around. Just the wind, whistling the valentine whistle like it's in love with the town. And the rain, determined on scrubbing away the town as if it's a giant stain. And the ash. The whole continent of ash.

_Move, _says the Voice in his head. _Move. Right now. _

The bells are even louder, renting the air, desperate.

_Dean._

There's just a moment of hesitation before he obeys. He stumbles through an alley, squishing his way through bugs and ash and other things, _dead_ things. There's a little girl at the end of the street, swaying and spinning round and round slowly, humming, and he thinks for a moment that she's going to be a problem—being around any human is a problem because the _smell, _the _hunger—_but then she looks at him with uncomprehending eyes and he guesses her culinary preferences are rather similar to his.

_Keep moving. Left, turn left. There's a house there. It's empty._

And it's there, the house, just like the Voice said. A giant brownstone thing right out of a horror story, the kind of house where pianos play by themselves in the dead of the night and ghostly brides run around weeping in all their virginal glory. It's there, it's falling apart, windows on tenterhooks, rafters collapsing, one whole wall caved inward.

And when he gets to the porch, the door is swinging eerily on its hinges and it makes him feel like someone had been here, someone important _had been here_ _just now_ and he'd missed them. Or maybe that's not a feeling at all because the insides of the house, the walls, are full of sigils.

Symbols in red spray-paint decorate every surface, the red visible even through the black topography moisture makes on the walls. But the symbols aren't the only images. There are other marks, scrawled on the wall in red ink.

Messages. _Numbers._

He moves to them, traces a finger along a letter, tries to pull it up from the grey swirl of his memories—what's that shape?—but he can't remember.

_What does it say? _he asks the Voice and is met with deafening silence.

(apparently, that's a one-way radio, and it's not transmitting at the mo)

The water is upto his ankles in the house and teems with those weird black bugs. Dean shakes them off and sways up the stairs, testing the floor. He would still crawl out if the whole thing collapsed, but nothing has taken a chunk off his face yet, and he was still passably human-looking for that hunter, so why risk it?

It's dark up here, with still more sigils on the walls, and he's standing there in the middle of the room thinking through his next move when the whole house starts shaking.

It goes on for a minute, dust and cement raining on him (along with actual rain, but that rain's a bitch, and he's gonna ignore it) and he has a vague feeling that something's happening outside, _something_ _big, _because the goddamn bells have finally stopped, but someone's screaming. It's too plaintive a sound for a monster to make: drawn-out and pleading and intensely sorrowful. It also goes on for way too long for the attacker to be one of the zombies (_Undead, _he remembers suddenly, that's the name, and yes, _fuck originality_) because they're all for fast-food and this has the making of a gourmet meal.

It sounds like a woman, and the sudden gut instinct that surges through the zombie-haze is to grab something (a _gun, I need a gun)_ and go out into that weird, shiny, gossamer night to save her from whoever, _whatever_ is making her make that sound.

_Don't go out, _says the Voice. _You'll be safe here, Dean. Don't go out till the rain stops._

And so he crashes through another door, finds a room full of books and clothes strewn around, a little glass elephant with its head missing, a couple of photos with the faces missing, and a nearly full bottle of Jack Daniels.

And he drinks the whole bottle even though it tastes like ash and paper and sticky wet cardboard, because it makes him smaller and weightless, and because somewhere in the back of his mind is the idea that this bottle is his friend if he ever wanted to just leave.

It isn't _sleep _as much as reduced awareness. It's more like slotting himself so far down the depths of his own soul that he needs to climb a ladder to get back to reality, and all the while he can see the corner of the room, the dark patina of the mould climbing the walls, the sharp cone of light that the moon makes against the floor- but he's also seeing other things, strange things that float into his thoughts as if the very wind's infected with his memories.

_(Do zombies really sleep? And if they do, should they dream of deceased sheep?)_

He walks down the crumbling stairs and the house is different.

Stairs go up and stairs go down and whichever way he goes, he comes right back to a beach on the first floor. The tide kowtows with the wooden floor, breaking over the splintered wood, lapping against empty picture frames. The walls ripple like wax and become faces that laugh and laugh.

_Dean. Dean Winchester. Remember us?_

_(and how is he supposed to when there are a hundred of them, a thousand, how is he supposed to know)_

_Remember us? We remember you._

_(shut up)_

_It's your fault, you know. All this is your fault. Broke the world, you did._

_(shutupshutupshutup)_

Dean starts shooting them then. _Lock, load, aim, take that_, _you sons of bitches. _The gun is sure in his grip, his shots meeting the targets effortlessly. There's none of the zombie-disconnect here. The faces bleed and melt and fade away, only to bloom again, blossoming like ugly, necrotic flowers. But this is like those games where an ammo bonus lasts forever, and Dean gets to have his fun feeding them all a fatal shotgun meal.

Almost a _good_ dream, you could say. As good as his dreams get.

But then in between the shots he glances away from the walls, to the centre of the hall-which-is-now-a-beach where the waves wash softly against the chrome rails of a black car. Light falls through slats in the windows of the house and gleams off the top of the car in arcs. It bounces off the taillights, the windows. The _Chevrolet _embossing on the front grill is a fucking rainbow and it hurts to even look at it, but it's beautiful. Kind of overwhelming, even.

And Dean thinks: _he'll know that car anywhere._

And the tall young man, leaning against the hood and looking at him with steady hazel eyes; he'll know _him _anywhere too.

In any life, in any universe, in any state.

(_I'm Dean, and this is my brother, Sam_; that's it, that's the sentence, this is the _person_)

His jeans are ripped at the knees, a smear of something dark cuts across his cheek, but he looks normal.

Sam, with his eyebrows employing the full power of Sam-bitchiness.

_I left you messages, Dean, _he says, sullenly, meaning the walls. Dean looks at the walls, but the numbers and letters that weren't sigils have all melted. They run down the walls in indecipherable red streaks, like tears.

_I can't read them, _he says. _They're gone. What did they say?_

His brother shrugs. _I was just counting things._

The light is getting brighter, almost painfully so. The Impala gleams, and the rainwater is evaporating, clouds of steam billowing between them, and it's getting harder and harder to see, but then Sam takes his hand and says, with something like quiet wonder: _Hey, Dean, look. You can see my mind now._

And strangely, impossibly, it's true. Dean is stumbling through an infinity of layers, like a mirror maze, and there are glimpses of his face and glimpses of their past and ghosts, so many ghosts of people they used to know, and they are all running towards him, converging, disappearing into a dark blue emptiness, and then there's nothing but a series of faded circles, _O! O! O!, _the discarded rinds of a thousand screams.

_It's all that's left,_ says Sam, sadly. _Sorry._

But the light is killing them both now, too bright, too bright and too hot, and Sam lets go, and Dean's still asking him—because this is important, he has to know this— _What were you counting? What were you counting, Sammy?_

And then the Voice is in his head, yelling, screaming, _wakeupwakeupwakeup_.

He looks away from the light.

Closes his eyes_._

_(make it stop)_

Wills himself to wake.

He hears a sound.

It is near, and it is wings.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: **_Just a quick note! This chapter, as the one before it, is greatly inspired by Andrew Smith's The Marbury Lens (in tone) I used the stark style of that novel to depict the craziness of the apocalypse going on here._

**_Warning:_**_ Language. _F-bombs and suchness. Some violence.****

* * *

He looks up, thinking: _Sam, Sam, where the hell is Sam?_

And then: _the water is actually fucking evaporating._

It's fascinating to him, the patterns the boiling water makes against the floor, the steam that rises up from the ground and presses against the few unbroken windows like imprisoned souls wanting to be let out. When the windows don't budge, they take a sullen, circuitous path out through the ventilators, and it is by following their path that he realizes that the "light" part of the dream was true (also) true.

The windows on this side of the room are dark, but bright gold spills through the windows on the other side, and through the ventilators. Where it hits his skin, the light is hot, painful, and he just knows that getting a full blast of it would be like dunking himself in scalding acid. He needs to get up and go somewhere that's darker, dark and cool.

But the _next_ revelation is that the Undead don't get drunk on entire bottles of liquor; they just get dead slow.

That empty bottle by his feet is the thing that's tethered him to this place, to this chair with the light painting swirls on its hand-rests, and he looks at the dust motes whirling madly and colliding like drunk drivers on their silly little dust-mote highways and wonders why they don't just quit, take a chair and sit down and have a drink and stop moving so much.

And is it strange in this strange enough world that alcohol increases clarity? Weird, but probably not. If a butterfly beating its wings in Tasmania (_thanks, Sammy) _can cause the Hurricane Katrina, one Undead person can use a drink to filter out the noise in his brain.

So, he thinks: _Sam._ He'll have to find a pen and write it down, find a pen and write it down RIGHT NOW, if he can still remember the shapes of the letters, because it's an important word. And a small word too.

Literally small, but metaphorically—

_(_metaphorically:_ now see, it's all big words with Dean Winchester, getting pedantic in his new incarnation) _

–metaphorically, the word is kind of big.

You know. CAPS LOCK BIG. Lights-little-Christmas-lights-through-his-brain, gives-him-an-electric-clarity kind of big.

You know. _Purpose_ big.

So that's priority number one. The word _Sam _and all it implies. He needs to write that down.

And what was he saying in the dream? Something about counting...Dean's heard him say that before. In maybe another world, another time. _I'm counting, Dean._ It darts around in his brain, that memory, slippery as an eel, and he can't grab hold of it.

There's just a single second between the Voice in his head yelling _MOVE_, and every last unbroken window in the house shattering. That's the second in which he's so surprised, startled by the Voice that he promptly gets down from the chair, onto the floor, and the glass shards fly everywhere, each one carrying a rainbow within, a little world made of glass and light and shadows.

_It is near. _

_It is wings._

It stands near the windows, peering in, but it can't come in. Dean raises his head to look but this one's running on full battery, and it's almost like looking at the sun, only the sun doesn't carry giant scimitars or speak Enochian or look like it just crawled out of Middle Earth wearing something like half a toga.

God and his crackerjack soldiers.

Nothing here_, _he hears it say. Nothing human.

And when it moves away—leaving scorch marks in the shape of a giant handprint where it touched the window sill—Dean rises to his feet from amongst a pool of rainbow-glass, shambles to the window and looks out at the town, still lit golden.

He's just in time to see a host of angels—ten or twenty of them, at least, he's never seen _so many_— disappear in a flutter of invisible wings.

The water stops boiling. Temperature drops till it's cold enough that he can pretend the ash raining from the sky is actually snow. The darkness that falls is not absolute, but bleached and pallid, lit by the sky-gash, like someone's soaked up all the gold and painted the remaining surface grey.

The silence that falls has the static quality of a thousand dead voices riding the air waves.

By the time the rain stops two hours later, Dean's losing his mind, or whatever tattered bits of it that he's slowly been gluing back together.

He needs to eat or he's gonna turn back into the stereotypical shuffling, can't-hinge-my-mandible type of monster and that monster doesn't remember things.

He's stayed up all night thinking of more new things. Cicadas and sunlight and airplanes and salt. Prescription painkillers and porno. Gopher dust and knots, tools of the trade, duffels of guns. Flickering motel signs. Wind on his face, his car blasting "mullet rock" as Sam(antha) calls it.

So many new things.

That angle at which you have to twist a handcuff to get it off you, the liminal space between life and death, grumpy old men with trucker hats and a penchant for building iron-walled panic rooms in their free time instead of eating pie and watching television soaps.

But they're all a vortex in his head, and threatening to dissolve into the vacuum that's better suited for what he is.

And that word he's finally remembered how to write, written in shaky malformed letters on his forearm: sometimes he looks at that word and can't remember what it is supposed to be.

Then it's as if the whole world is a yawning black hole, and he's at the edge of it, and there's nowhere to go but forward into senselessness. When the memory of it comes back, he grabs on to it, a drowning man clutching a straw, and he wants to weep with the relief of it but tears are impossible.

He's meant to be primordial and soulless and- _and this is supposed to be _easy.

It used to be easy.

Now he can't go back to that and he's not sure if he likes whatever the hell he is now.

_What AM I now? _He asks the Voice, but it's silent today.

He feels a bit like an unmanned glider, veering through mountains of memories.

There are two of them when they shamble into the house around midmorning: slow and sluggish from feeding too much, wandering the hall when Dean spots them. Other Undead. New ones, still mostly human. He can tell because they're speaking. _Singing_, madly_. _

The longer you're Undead, the less human you become, unless you're Dean Winchester.

He's cruising the reverse learning curve all by himself.

One of the Undead has got all his limbs and most of the rest of him, except one side of his face is kind of smushed and wet, like a melon that fell on its side with great force and exploded. That one fought a grim fight before succumbing to this madness. The other one is all bones and strings, rubber-bands and rope, and you could bend him and he would break like a twig; you could squish him and he would burst like a tick.

It's odd what happens next, and Dean can't explain it at all, except to note that they don't seem to like him.

At all.

And he thinks: the other pack liked him just fine before he ganked half of them to get to his Happy Meal. What's changed since then? He's got a new imaginary friend, is all.

_(speaks in his head and finds him places to nest, a real pal)_

But here they are now, his...(_brethren?),_ a wordless shriek scraping through their desiccated throats, instinctual murder in their eyes, coming at him in a flurry of tattered clothes and flapping skin.

The scuffle is minor, unimportant but messy, but when he's done he's standing in the midst of a pile of offal, everything a mess of bone and brains and other stuff, black blood speckling him like ceremonial ink for some obscure Sam-found-this-in-a-prehistoric-book ritual.

And he can't believe how easy all of it is. The killing, the eviscerating, the survival skills that must have remained intact through whatever changes his body's been through.

Because if there's anything Dean Winchester is good at when he puts his mind to it, it's this.

Surviving.

For the greater purpose that doesn't give a damn about him in the end.

_Dean, _says the Voice, and it sounds heavy, sad, like the somber last twang of a cello in some symphony designed for the schmaltzy background score of a soap opera.

It's evening when he wanders out into the town.

The ash is worse than before, though the rain has stopped, and the Voice is silent so that must mean he can go out.

It's strange how he can't smell anything here. In other places, other towns, the song of blood and flesh was loud, relentless. Here there's nothing but an atomic buzz of hearts beating and lungs breathing, whisper-soft, and if it's a technique to ward off the Undead and their hunger, it's a damn good trick.

Or maybe that has something to do with the angels blowing through town apparently every night.

Where the angels had landed- wherever they had walked- the ash is gone and a footstep has been seared to the ground, black and ink-bright. Almost irrationally, he skirts these bits. Goes around them, taking care not to even _come _close enough to touch it. He doesn't know what he's looking for exactly, but he walks until he stops in front of an electronics store.

Light flickers behind the glass, and one TV is still playing looping footage of months-old news. He sees a wall, fire flickering behind it, and the giant letters on the screen are saying something—_LIVE!_ he reads after a few tries— and there's a man on the wall suddenly, a glowing man with wings like living black fire, and he stands and laughs while bullets bounce off him.

Bit ridiculous really, the footage of men trying to gun down angels. A bit like a kitten mewling at a lion. Or a dragon. Or some other large crazy mammal. Sam would have a better comparison to offer.

In the background, the fire seems to be falling from the sky, big fucking balls of it, and there are clips of trucks exploding, a building falling, a brown-skinned kid reaching a hand curiously towards a giant flaming rock and then shying away, face crumpling in tears.

_Plague of fire and brimstone. It's Biblical, _says the Voice, conversationally.

_Strike that off the list, _Dean thinks. The man on TV looks oddly familiar with his golden hair and slightly cherubic face, but before Dean can drag that face out of the haphazard piles in his head, a dark shape moves in the window. There's no time to twist around, no time for anything. The cold barrel of a gun presses to the base of his neck, pointing up, and he knows that a single shot would mean the end of him—Undead or not. That's Zombie 101. _Aim for the head._

And he doesn't want to die. There's a word on his arm now, written down in wonky, malformed letters. It's got to lead to something and he needs to find out what.

"No quick movements," says a gruff voice. In the reflection on the glass storefront, the man is tall, taller than Dean, with a hard set to his mouth and a harder steel in his eyes. Kind of like a hunter.

He guesses everyone is kind of like a hunter in this world.

Dean raises his arms slowly, to show the man he understands. He _understands._ He shouldn't, but he does, and he can hear the man gasp.

"Christ, the girl's right," he says.

There's a whiff of burned rubber, sweat and salt and then Dean's being pushed against the glass, the man still holding the gun to his neck while someone else ties his arms behind his back with what feels like cables. _Overkill. _He thinks for a moment, then struggles, and _God he's strong_ because the kid with the cables falls on his ass, clutching his jaw and looking stupefied while Dean frees his arms from the cables that come apart easy as dandelion fluff, and he nearly disembowels the other one, grabbing his gun with one hand and aiming a fist for his intestines, and he'd have done it, _ripped through him _and felt smug about it even, but then the man's eyes widen in fear and surprise and he chokes out: "_Dean Winchester. _Are you Dean Winchester? We're not gonna hurt you!"

So now Dean's surprised too; that makes three of them, and one of them is still looking butt-hurt and angsty and sitting on the floor. That's the kid from before—Seven-Fingered Patrick. He looks a bit horrified under all that emo, but it's almost an afterthought, like he's telling himself to be scared.

_Blink_. A second passes. _Blink_. Two.

Then, slowly, Dean nods. Relief floods brightly into the man's face, and his shoulders sag. Dean pulls the gun from his grip, presses the long barrel against the ash-covered ground and leans a little on it. How does one say _how do you know my name?_ He settles for a questioning growl instead. Sounds menacing enough.

Good.

"She wants to see you," the man says, casting a furtive glance behind him, but only for a second before his eyes dart back to Dean, the gun, the kid on the floor, Dean again. "I'm Pittman. Travis Pittman. This is Patrick. Please, just come with us."

Footsteps, running. A group of men barge into the street, wild-eyed and gasping, and one of them cocks his gun. Dean raises the gun by his side, prepared to claw through them if that was his only way, but Travis Pittman raises his hand.

"It's all right! It's all right, you lot. She's right. He's not your average cannibal."

The men glare, unsure, but Pittman must be their leader or something. No one questions him. The guy with the gun lowers it, and so does Dean. No need to get in a fight too when this giant apocalyptic clusterfuck's already blocked every metaphorical road.

The first drops of rain are beginning to fall. Everyone looks up at the sky, expectant, but he's the only one with no clue of what's about to go down. The wind starts howling and the sky is thundering as before, as the first day, but intermittent flashes of light show through the gash in the sky.

"We have to move," says Pittman, an edge of fear in his steady voice.

"Evangeline's in the Prayer Hall," says one of the newcomers, just as the first bell nearly drowns out his last word.

Dean has just enough time to think _Evangeline? _before Patrick brings something down on his head in a magnificent blow that sends fireworks shooting through his vision.

_(damn sneaky son of a bitch)_

For a moment it's beautiful, like the fourth of July and a sky lit with gemstone colors, or like looking through a kaleidoscope, and then it gets brighter, brighter, brilliant; a supernova explosion.

And then it's just dark.

The first thing he sees is light.

Someone's singing, softly. It sounds like an old man. Someone else is playing a harmonica, and through the dark incoherence of blood-tinged thoughts and the mess of broken kite strings that were once memories, something cuts through, razor-sharp and beautiful, and he nearly chokes on it.

_There's that car again, and it's night. _

_The flickering light from a motel sign occasionally washes the windshield red; turns the puddles of water on the asphalt road red like blood. He's sitting on the steps leading into a motel room, the door is open, the room is empty except for the soft sounds of a faucet dripping in the bathroom and the edges of newspaper clippings flapping on the walls, like trapped birds. _

_There's music, loud and merciless, and it's coming from the car. _

_(this is what giving up feels like)_

_He doesn't even know what day it is, or where they are. All the names of all the towns are blurring as if he's watching the world unfold through a piece of ground glass._

_(there was a field delirious with flowers, and something happened there) _

Then the light gets brighter, becomes a small white sun dancing in front of his face, and he realizes that he's looking into a flashlight. Through the walls of wherever this is, he can hear the bells ringing, a muffled soundtrack to madness.

He's tied to a chair. His mouth tastes of ash, and the whole room smells of sweet incense and damp. The dappled light that falls over his skin in patches is tinted pink and green and blue, and seems to be coming through a stained glass window.

The old man's song is _Amazing Grace_. He's heard it before, through car stereos on winter nights with Christmas lights blinking on every house they pass, in those few weeks when every station plays Christmas songs and he can't pretend to hate it enough to change the station when it comes on.

This is a church.

_Prayer hall, _he remembers. _Evangeline._

As though he's said it out loud, something moves in a clatter of footsteps.

"Hullo, mister," says a girl's voice, and he can see a bit of her, a white-laced doll standing just at the corner of his vision. "I'm Evangeline. The angel said you were comin'"

Evangeline cries tears of blood and takes a bite of bread.

It should look horror-movie or something, thinks Dean, but it doesn't. It looks like she's having dinner, and it looks like she doesn't like it—_I want chocolate, mister-man, but there ain't any left—_and occasionally it also looks like she's entirely bored.

_(how do you get bored with an apocalypse?)_

"You want some?" she asks, pointing to a loaf of bread. The stupid girl's gone and untied him, sent away Pittman and his lurking cronies, and the old man and his harmonica player are still singing upon a little raised platform.

It's like he's on a date with a Bloody Mary victim.

He looks incredulously at the bread. All things considered, he should be jonesing to take a bite out of her neck, but the damn incense is messing with his brain.

He manages to shakes his head a bit.

"Didn't 'fink so," she says, stuffing the last of her slice in her mouth. "You walked a long way though, mister-man. The angel said. He said you didn't know it, but you were a-walkin' to me. To this town. We're just a little speck in the world, you see, but we're _im-port-ant_. The angel said. Both of us, very _important._"

_Right. Lacy marionette girl is also crazy._

She wipes the tears on a blood-soaked handkerchief and smiles at him. "I s'pose I do look like a doll, Mister Winchester. The townspeople want their prophet all decked-up, God's light shinin' through her eyelet dress or whatever, ha-ha," she laughs, and draws a little smiley face with a drop of blood on the table. He doesn't have enough time to coherently form a thought about her _reading his mind_ before she barges on, fixing him with a critical gaze. "The angel said you would be different."

_Different. Rational? _He looks at his arm, the word written there, wonders for a second how many Undead could even dredge up the letters from the mire of their brains.

_Different._

"You have very green eyes, mister. The others, they got odd eyes. White. Like glass, and you can look through them and see that there ain't anythin' in their noggin' anymore but mush."

Evangeline must be around eighteen or nineteen. Her eyes could be anything from blue to bright yellow, but right now all he can concentrate is on the steady drip of blood from the corners. Her lashes are sticky with it. Her face is doll-like too, all delicate features, framed by her thick, dark and wildly curling hair.

His gaze keeps coming back to her eyes, at the casual way she wipes the droplets off with that soggy rag.

"We all been bleeding since this started," she says, shrugging, reading him again _(how the fuck did she do that?) _"Me and Zoey and little Rachel down by the lake, and Mrs. Lincoln up on Eastend Road, but I'm the only one who hears the angel. Mrs. Lincoln is deaf as a doorpost, and the wee ones are just too wee. They run 'round screaming and roll on the ground because he's too loud. 'Tis a pity, it gets their mamas all worked up, but I don't think the angel knows how to be quiet. He can be a bit, you know," she lowers her voice and leans closer, flapping a hand and whispering because oh, _he doesn't know_, she probably thinks it's blasphemy or something, " a bit _dumb._ You'd think he'd figure out three prophets are better than one, but _no_._"_

Outside, the bells reach a feverish frequency. He wishes it would stop; the rhythm seems to jolt his entire being, and Evangeline keeps watching him with that same laser-eyed gaze that tells him that this, her Chatty Cathy attitude, is just a cover for someone sharp, sharp as a scythe, her whole soul pared to a bare minimum, to the tip of an arrow: for what she believes is some kind of _purpose._

"You see the sky-gash, mister? Big rip-like thingy in the sky? I'll show you somethin' you ain't ever seen before."

When she gets up and walks to a door, he follows, nearly tripping over his feet. She pushes open the door and waves him through it, and they're in a narrow corridor that smells of dust. The walls are engraved with verses from the Bible, and Evangeline traces her arm lightly over them as she moves, a little bounce in her step. The bare bulb illuminating the room throws long cones of light, and in the light of it Dean sees that there are also images on the walls.

Crude ones, like hieroglyphics, that contrast with the archaic English.

_This shit just gets weirder and weirder._

At the end of the corridor, Evangeline takes a deep breath and presses her palms flat against another door.

"They ain't gonna like you, mister. Let me do the talking and the dancing around the facts."

_Is that a fucking joke? _he thinks, but then she leads him into a room lit so bright that it must be the sun, plucked out of the sky and put in here, and there are _so many people _in here that it's ridiculous. It's all sweat and breath, blood-pumping hearts and dizzying warmth, and it jams itself down his nose, a sensory wave rippling through him darkly, deliciously, vertiginously. For a minute he's gone, flashing insane, a low growl ripping from his throat, but then Evangeline's arm is on his, her skin hot as fire and branding him, grounding him, keeping him if not _human, _then at least a poor copy of one.

"Stay close, Mister Winchester. They got guns and they're forever pissed enough to shoot first, ask questions later."

As if hearing her, every head in the room turns towards them.

He doesn't know what he sees in every face, but he supposes it could be fear. And anger, in some. It's only in a small group standing near the front that he sees open _hope._ They crowd around Evangeline, touching her, touching her hair and her face and crooning in soft voices. The others just shy away, wary, afraid to hope. It's silent as a grave in here. Awful, cold, damp. Some of these people have burlap sacks with them, filled with their worldly possessions. Some have nothing but empty eyes.

"Dean Winchester," says Evangeline, extricating herself from the tangle of limbs she's swamped in. "Meet the people of Brockton, North Carolina."

The people of Brockton, North Carolina_ really_ don't look like they want to meet Dean Winchester.

"Evie's been talking about you," says one from the group that is still going all touchy-feely on Evangeline, like just touching her would deliver them from this mad world. "She says you'll stop this. She says her angel said you could stop all this."

A moment of hopeful, expectant silence while Dean thinks, _okay, nice to meet you, find me a hole so I can crawl into it and hide. _They look like they expect him to burst into archaic speech.

"He's not going to stop anything," says a man, and Dean can't pinpoint where his voice is coming from. "He's one of those...those _things._ You don't really think he's on the side of the _good_ angels?_"_

Was he? He has a feeling he _was, _once long ago. Before all the winged things in the world turned out to be bastards. _Think about it._ Angels, aeroplanes, creepy carrion birds.

"We're all just being misled by her," the man hisses.

And that's enough for the dam of silence to break.

Dean lets them argue. He looks around, wrapping his brain around things. Evangeline believes he's been led to her. By an_ angel._ This town is full of ash and rain and bells signaling something, and that something has to do with _angels._ They have a prophet girl who dresses in lace and weeps blood and speaks with a pretence drawl. He has a Voice in his head. He has no Sam.

Everything is so confusing.

"_Abraham," _says Pittman, suddenly, Dean looks up at his voice. He's talking to a man who's holding Evangeline's arm, holding it in a twist that could break it. "Let her go."

"I'm tired of this shit!" Abraham says, whirling on Pittman, pulling Evangeline along like a rag doll. "I'm tired of her talk about angels, and I'm tired of this nightmare repeating _every night,_ and now she's brought one of them Undead in here and _she's going to slaughter us all._ You wait and see if she doesn't!"

"She's trying to _save _us. She says he'll stop it; her angel hasn't been wrong before, has it? It brought _him _here, just like it said it would."

Abraham laughs; a bitter sound. "And you never once considered she may be talking to the _bad guys _in her brain? I've heard the chatter; that the actual _devil_ is up west. You don't think Evangeline could be talking to _him?_"

Pittman and most of the crowd looks rather scandalized, but Dean guesses that Abraham has a point. World's a nasty little bitch.

Evangeline doesn't look fazed at all.

"Devil's already got his prophet. You killed 'er, didn't you, Mister Winchester?" she asks, her eyes flicking to him for a second. "They say she was the Whore of Babylon."

He's saved from having to confirm this by the lights going out. The crowd doesn't even gasp; they just fall totally silent, as if at the press of a switch, and in the dark he feels a touch on his arm and knows that it's Evangeline.

"Come with me," she whispers.

The bells have gone silent too. Evangeline leads him to the tall windows on one side of the hall and they crouch down. He can see the town through this window, remembers that the church was rather high up compared to the rest of Brockton, had several narrow steps leading up to it.

"Look."

Dean Winchester has seen a lot of shit in his life.

It started when he was four, and every time he thought _okay, that's it, that's the weirdest thing ever, _something else showed up to take the crown. This one would bust even his weird-meter.

"It shouldn't be beautiful," murmurs Evangeline.

But it is. The gash in the sky is lit up, bright as the brightest thing ever, and through it shapes float down, what could be the antithesis of shadows, taking shape as they touch the ground. Men-like, but God-like too.

"The first time they came down," says Evangeline, with an awed hush in her voice, "Their Graces burned a hole in the sky."

_Heaven's Warriors, _says the Voice.

"Yes," Evangeline whispers. "They seem to _burn _the sky. Ash rains down on us."

She pauses while they watch the town filling up with them, at least twenty or thirty of them, the light from them blazing over the houses, flowing through the street like liquid fire.

Why are they _here, _though? What did Brockton, North Carolina do to get their attention?

"It's my fault," says Evangeline, the bloody tears still dripping down her face. She stands up. "You'll see."

As yesterday, the silence of the bells is followed by someone screaming. But this time he's not in a sigils-protected house far away. This time he's here, in the church, and the woman screaming is in here too. Hushed, the crowd moves away from her, and he sees that she's curled up on the ground, just lying there screaming and struggling with whatever demons in her head, but a moment later the hall fills with light, every little cherub statue glowing bright as a beacon, every frightened face brought sharply into focus.

The ground shakes, glass panes vibrating furiously behind him, but these don't explode. He turns to look outside, at the town, and finds them all right outside the windows, all those angels, serene and dangerous and deadly. _Just standing there._ It's creepy as hell.

The screaming woman stops abruptly and stands, swaying. A blast of lightning brings her into clear focus and he can see them, see the dark shapes of wings thrown starkly against the walls.

She's a vessel.

Evangeline walks to her, shoulders stiff.

"You're down to one hundred and ninety six," the angel says, sweeping its eyes over the population of Brockton, its voice soft and sad, like welcoming Evangeline into an embrace. "Will you not give in?"

Her vessel's skin is already flaking, boiling from within. These are normal people, people who can't take the Grace of an angel into the confined prisons of their bodies without it ripping free.

Evangeline shakes her head. "I will not."

The angel reaches out a hand and touches Evangeline's cheek. "You would be loved. They will be saved," she—it—says, waving an arm to indicate the crowd of awed watchers. "We will lead you into heaven right now."

"You are lying," whispers Evangeline. Every syllable of her statement is hopeful for some clue, some indication that she _isn't _right, but Dean sees that she knows she is. She's sure of it. "You're lying. If I let you have what you want, you will abandon us, and then we'll be left to face the devil's wrath. I'd rather fear the devil than the angel."

The angel smirks. "Is it then a choice between losing your humanity, and losing your life? Because we will never stop requiring vessels, and we will make this town our fishing pool till all the fish run out."

Evangeline's sharp gasp is echoed by the crowd. She looks small standing there, against the angel and its albatross wings. She looks like a whirlwind of bees could cart her off to Ohio.

She looks beaten.

"Then," she says, her eyes slipping slowly, almost imperceptibly, to Dean. "We will wait for a miracle, or die, servin' your _heaven _through no will of our own_."_

The angel cocks its head to the side; smiles. "I will ask again tomorrow. I will ask until you are all that's left in this room. You and your guilt."

Then it's gone, in a rush of wings and lightning, and someone is screaming, "_My son, _they took my son!" and it's all confusion, sobbing, screeching. As far as Dean can tell, five people or so have just disappeared into thin air.

_It's like a tithe, _chimes in the Voice. Evangeline just stands there, white amidst the rush of her people. When she finally turns back to him, she looks almost hysterical.

"And those are the _good_ guys, Mister Winchester."


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note:** Ugh, someone had to teach me how to edit these things once you posted them before I could get the author's notes in here. I do leave A/Ns on my LJ but I couldn't figure out whether it was okay in here (the rules say something about author's notes that confused me)

**So, hey everybody!** If you've read this far, thank you! Reviews mean a lot, as do speculation, and questions make me JOYFUL. :)

**Supernatural**obviously doesn't belong to me, I'm just playing in Kripke's sandbox and making apocalyptic mud pies. Evangeline does belong to me, and I'm enjoying writing her. **This chapter has pretty graphic violence, and F-bombs for everyone.**

** Enjoy :)**

* * *

_Baby this town rips the bones from your back  
Its a death trap, it's a suicide rap  
We gotta get out while we're young  
`cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run_

- _Bruce Springsteen_

Seven-Fingered Patrick tosses what looks like a hundred newspapers onto the desk.

"Take your time, it's not like the world's ending around us or anything," he says, sneering.

Across Dean, Evangeline gives him a _look, _but says nothing_. _She pulls a newspaper out of the pile and points to a picture. "That's the first time they came down."

Dean can't make out the large words surrounding the picture, but the images are of the sky bleeding Grace, of scores of people who happened to be looking up at the exact moment and ended up with their eyes scorched. Of crowds congregating in front of churches. Evangeline shows him more pictures. A plague of locusts in Egypt. Scorched handprints on churches across India. The Euphrates river, turning to blood and spawning winged warriors by the thousands. Winged shapes atop that cathedral in Prague.

And across the world, the names of the two archangels becoming common chatter.

_Michael _and _Lucifer. _

"They're makin' their armies," says Evangeline. "Michael called on a host of angels. The Devil's more _work with what you have. _We're his resources. _You-_" she waves vaguely at Dean, "No, the- the _Undead, _are _his."_

Dean doesn't know what to make of any of this. _How did it come to this? _How did he get on the devil's side? When did this become a battle? And he's supposed to remember something, but he can't-

_(there was a field)_

-he can't remember _anything._ Not the transition from _human _to this, not the beginning of Apocalypse Phase Two: Absolute Annihilation.

Not even Sammy.

_(but there was a field, a field delirious with flowers, and he remembers he was there, he was there with Sam, and something happened there)_

"Mister Winchester?"

He looks at Evangeline.

"I don't think you're _on the devil's side._ You don't have the mark."

She points to an image of a city street, a street scorched and torched, every building a twist of blackened metal and glass. Her finger hovers over one of them- _(one of us)_- the Undead on the street.

_(how did he not notice this?)_

"See?" asks Evangeline, pointing to the mark on the Undead man's forehead. "That's the Devil's number, Mister Winchester. The triple-six. You don't have it."

Patrick snorts from where he's sitting on the floor, back against the doorframe like he's the scrawny barrier between them and the apocalypse. "No, 'course not. He's the Abercrombie Zombie. Best representation of America's New Face."

Dean wonders just how high his newfound moral grounds are. He supposes they're not too high that he'd feel much guilt over offing Patrick.

Evangeline looks down at the table, her fingers twisting the hem of her bloodied dress nervously.

"Brockton is _special, _Mister Winchester. It ain't supposed to be, but it _is._"

Patrick stands. "Come on, Evie, we'll show the dummy. See if miracle-man won't glow or something when he sees it. Worth a shot, right?"

_A day or two ago, _Dean thinks in annoyance as he follows the two kids down a flight of stairs into what seems to be a basement, _he would have eaten the stupid kid by now. _Or not. What if stupidity was contagious?

The basement is dark and damp, and when Evangeline pulls a cord, a lone bare bulb comes on. The yellow light illuminates a cramped room, the walls of which are papered with hundreds of pink sticky notes. There's a small bed in one corner of the room, a dresser spewing more lace clothes, a collection of books, and pink underwear.

Patrick snorts.

"_I _didn't buy them," mutters Evangeline, and Dean doesn't know what's creepier. Townspeople with kinky ideas for their prophet's wardrobe, or the Enochian that Evangeline seems to have scribbled on whole boxes of sticky notes.

"Through here," she says, and Dean sees that there's another door. It leads into a room with a low stone ceiling, and the walls are aglow with sigils. They stand out a pale luminous green in the stone, faint, almost beautiful.

"Luminous coral. This room's been here forever. The church is more than three hundred years old, Mister Winchester, and it was built around this room," Evangeline tells him, leading him to the centre of the room where there's a table with a scroll on a dusty velvet cushion. "They say old Father Goddard brought it from Jerusalem or somewhere, and it's been in the church since. It used to be in the main prayer hall, in a warded box, but then I moved it down here."

Patrick kicks lightly at the leg of the table and scowls. "Can't even touch it without bits of it crumbling to dust."

_You have to take it, Dean. _Dean looks around stupidly for a minute, before realizing it's the Voice speaking. Being rather sporadic today. What did it do when silent, learn back flips?

Evangeline presses her lips together and speaks in a rush, swallowing half her words. "He came first, the Devil, askin' for it. Promisin' to give us anythin'. Tellin' us we'll have a place in his new world. Then the angels came, wantin' it too, promisin' to protect us, but they're all _lyin', _Mister Winchester, I can tell. 'S long as we have it, they kinda need us, but if it's gone, we're-"

"-as good as monster chow, yeah," mutters Patrick. "Not rocket science, that. We got no way out. Devil's not letting the hordes on us yet because of the scroll. The angels are picking vessels from amongst our people and raining ash down on us because we aren't giving _them_ the scroll so they can just up and leave us to face Lucifer's wrath. We're screwed over sideways."

_What the fuck was "_it"_ anyway? _He doesn't touch it because he believes Patrick. The thing looks like it's one touch away from becoming ancient Babylonian dust. It's tied closed with a frayed, color-leached ribbon, and what little he can see on the scroll looks spectacularly like chicken scratch.

"I don't know where it leads," says Evangeline, "But I know it's a map. And I know my angel wants you to have it."

"Yeah, give the scroll to him and let him be on his merry way and we'll all just _die _here."

The kid has a point. Dean waits for the Voice to chime in, say something, but it's quiet and he imagines he can feel it wondering too.

OOO

Brockton has an interesting system. Two hours before the angels come, Evangeline's eyes start to bleed. That's when the bells are rung to call everyone to take sanctuary in the church. One hour before the angels come, the rain starts pouring. No one knows where the weird bugs come from— maybe the eggs are carried by the thick ash that pours along with the rain—but they're big enough and badass enough to eat their way through you given the chance.

Every day the angels ask the same question. Every day Evangeline tells them no.

"We'd rather die as vessels than die as the Undead, which is what's bound to happen if I give them the scroll, Mister Winchester. No offense."

Every day five of them are taken as vessels.

The angels, Evangeline tells him, need vessels all the time. They're burning through them rapidly.

"All their original vessels were killed. If you ask me, Mister Winchester, Devil's got a hell of a PR Department."

He wishes she would stop with the _Mister Winchester _thing, just call him Dean for God's sake, but whatever part of her mind is tuned to his refuses to acknowledge that thought.

When Evangeline leaves, claiming exhaustion, Dean is left with too many questions that run and collide into each other madly. Like, _what is he supposed to do here? _Take the scroll and go? Go where? Do what, exactly?

The sigil-covered house at least is no mystery now. Evangeline had done that herself.

_("I can hide you in the church by just being with you, but you need some hidin' from the angels outside before I found you, my angel said.")_

Then there was the question of Evangeline's _angel._ Benevolent being or a cunning plotter? Could be either.

Dean goes through the newspapers, and the process is painfully slow. Letters dance, but pictures don't, and it's the pictures he looks at the most. There are some strange ones. Towns taken over by the Undead, bodies burning in a tangle of metal, a crop of strange new products that claim to _keep you safe from the infection._ Snake-oil and magic, whispered hope, black and white letters that mean nothing any more. Last concerts and despondent parties, shutters closed on theatres and doors shut on schools, migration the likes of which would stump the Klondike Gold Rush. A thousand apocalyptic cults, dead dogs, dead fish, dead everything.

_(The world ends not with a bang but a whimper.)_

And stories, _stories_ that he gleans from a few grasped words and grainy pictures in tabloids. Stories of men ripping through the Undead, death-mongers, desperados bathed in blood because this new, slick, mad world makes sense only to them. Flashes of recognition when he looks at some of their pictures, because these are men he'd met long back. Men _and _women; those that traded in knowledge of the supernatural, those that he met because of the mutual understanding that the things that go bump in the night are too real, too visceral.

Those that believed that taming iron and gunfire and believing yourself to be the sword of light slicing through the dark underbelly of the world is the only way to remain sane.

_Hunters._

He wouldn't be welcome in that peer group anymore, but he has a feeling that he hasn't been really welcome among them for a small while now.

Somewhere along the way, he and Sam took a different route from them, and maybe the road they chose was darker, pitch-black even: but it didn't matter in the end because the lights went out on every highway after all.

OOO

In the new, weird neo-consciousness that he _could _call sleep, Dean dreams again.

This time it's the pink room, and he's icing Zachariah with a sleek silver column of metal—_an angel blade—_and Adam Milligan tells him _no, don't._ And Dean tells the kid _hey, he's a bastard, he deserves this, _but that's not what Adam's talking about at all_. _

_You're going to walk out and doom me, _he says. His eyes weep white._ You're going to walk out and doom me every time._

And he looks from Adam to Sam. Sam who can barely stand, Sam who wipes blood from his mouth and looks at him with black, black eyesand a smile like he's going to burn the world down if he lets it grow into a laugh, and Dean just _knows _Adam is right, and he tells the boy that. _I'm sorry, _he says.

Adam grabs hold of his arm. _Do it right, _he says. _Do it right one time._

Dean says—in all the terrible bright light shining through the room he somehow finds his voice and he says: _I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Come on, Sam._

Such is the demon in him.

OOO

He wakes to screaming.

That is not new. Through flashes of memory, he remembers that the Undead travel in packs, and that some poor soul is always screaming until it doesn't have a brain anymore. But this voice—this is Evangeline, and she sounds terrified.

She sounds near.

Dean moves instantly, strange bloodlust driving him, the Voice screeching something indecipherable, something he thinks is definitely along the lines of _save that girl. _

Outside, the lights have blown out. The smell of sulfur, usually pungent, is a fucking blow to the face in his new state. Dean stumbles into the corridor and down it, his vision tunneling, and he thinks _demons, _and he thinks _of course, _because where there is smoke there is fire, and he'd wondered somewhere in the back of his brain why Lucifer wouldn't have his feelers out and scoping this place when the angels are obviously involved.

He finds Evangeline at the end of the corridor, pressed against a door, legs splayed and Abraham—well, no surprise there— kneeling between them, a knife-tip pressed against the bottom lid of her eye. Her hair is twisted around his fist, and where he obviously smashed her skull against the wall, the wood is wet and dark. Evangeline looks dazed, but alive, fingers scrabbling weakly against Abraham's hand, making his hand shake.

"Stop that!" he hisses and slaps her, nearly breaks her neck too with the force, and Dean sees her eyes close. "_Damn, _I need the bitch to keep them open."

There are two others with him and they aren't normal, run-of-the-mill demons. They're strangely made, like they're going to fall apart, skin stretched tight over bones, black eyes lidless and rolling. One of them catches sight of Dean and simpers, grabs at Abraham's jacket, points and grins like a skeleton.

Abraham's fist tightens in Evangeline's hair. "Told me to keep a look out for the scroll, he did, Winchester—but finding _you _here is a bonus. Guess she was talking to them bad guys in her head after all, huh? Led you straight to us. She wants to give you the scroll, double-cross us all, and frankly, everyone's had enough of you and your _games, _and there's a bounty on your head," he pauses and cocks his head curiously. "From _both _sides. How did you piss off _both sides?"_

Dean moves towards him, fast but not thinking, and the two demons latch onto him, and they all go down. Their hands swipe at his skin, makes gouge marks with nails that break off and litter the floor with a sound like rain against tin roofs. The sound their hearts make is wet and slow, and dead laughter peals from their throats in a constant stream. He struggles, but they're stronger than they look, breathing heavily and pinning him down. They lean to stare at his face and they laugh, and their eyeballs roll vertiginously in wet sockets, and are there _images _in them? Brimstone and fire and yellow eyes and corpses?

Evangeline comes to with a gasp, struggles a bit, then realizes that quick movements will probably lead to her head getting twisted off like a bottle cap. "We gotta go," she whispers. "We gotta go, we gotta go—"

"You aren't going anywhere," Abraham hisses, pressing the knife tighter against Evangeline's skin, his black eyes gleaming "I'm gonna take out your eye, girl, and then I'm gonna let them have you," he jerks a head at his comrades. "They've developed weird tastes. Not much above them zombie slugs, but they got sharper teeth. You'll go faster."

Evangeline looks at him dazedly, and repeats, simply, "We gotta go."

Abraham laughs. "Go _where?_ It's a fucking massacre out there. Can't you hear the screams? _It's May Day._ Hullo, Vietnam! It's _him _who forced our hand, Evie. Couldn't have Dean Winchester running around ruining it all. His brother was bad enough," he turns to Dean, as if struck with a thought. "Bet you don't remember him though, dummy that you are. Do you? You remember Sam, don't you? _Inseparable, _you two. You know what happened to him?"

It's not a question; it's a game. It's a game Dean's willing to play too. He wants to know_. He has to know. _There's a noise in his head like rain, rain pouring down so hard, and he's thinking of a field, overgrown with flowers, a _fucking field_, and he wants to tell this man _just say it say it just tell me _but then there's Evangeline, there's the flash of a knife, a gleam of silver and then blood sprays from Abraham's mouth and all over him, and the man gags while his brain tears apart in two halves bridged by that silver knife sticking into his brain all the way to the hilt, retches blood and flails, kicks his arms and legs like he's trying to pedal or swim, swim, swim through this pool of red and escape.

And that's when Dean lays hell on the demons holding him.

He jams a finger into one's lidless eye, like a spike–

_(and it's cold, wet, it leaks fluid over his hand and Sam would say "Did you really have to do that, Dean?" and look nauseated and Dean would call him a _girl, dude, you're such a girl_)_

-and the thing screeches and grabs at the gory socket with both eyes, backing off from Dean and careening drunkenly against the wall, while Dean snaps at the other one with his teeth, yanks at his arm and nearly tears it out. The limb barely dangles there when the demon clambers away, howling, and Dean's up instantly, slipping a little on the pool of Abraham's blood, grabbing at the wall, at the demon-thing—

_(break it, break him)_

_(Stop, Dean, _says the Voice)

_Snap-_

-like a twig, and he sends the limp form at warp speed against the far wall where it slips, slides, slurps a few breaths of air and then lies still, grey glop everywhere, and there's one more; _aren't you glad there's one more, one more game, one more beer, one more is always good when you're having a world of fun—_

"We gotta go," Evangeline wails, grabbing his arm and sliding around in the mess when he doesn't recognize that she's attached to him for a second while he casts around looking for the last demon. "We gotta go, we gotta go—"

Footsteps. Dean reaches for Evangeline, pulls her to her feet where she sways, reaching out with her hands, palms against his chest while she continues to whisper the same thing in a litany.

"Just _'Trick," _she whispers when he moves towards the shadow nearing them, and then lapses back to her sing-song.

"Dude, they want to_ torch her!" _is the first thing out of Patrick's mouth, right before he slips on the blood and falls on his butt and says "Damn! _Fuck, _what happened here?"

"Don't curse," giggles Evangeline. She looks close to some terrible panic, teetering at the edge. "It's a church, you dumbass. We gotta go, _now, _angel says go now, go now, get the_ fucking," _she gasps and slams a fist in her mouth and laughs madly, "Ha, don't _curse, _Evie. The scroll. Get the scroll _you moron—_how the hell are you gonna find Sam by standin' around, huh? I didn't say that, the angel did, I swear, Mister Winchester! You moron. _Moron. _Find the _scroll._"

Dean and Patrick stare at her for a moment. She laughs, then cries, then _glares_. "What the hell you two waitin' for?"

"Get her out, my truck's behind the church!" yells Patrick, staggering to his feet. "You understand me, dummy? The townspeople think Abe was right all along, that she's sold us off to the devil and there are _Undead _out there by the _scores, _so you two tell your stupid dick-wad angel to get down here and _save us._ And _fucking _wait for me!"

And Patrick's gone, running down the stairs to the basement where the scroll is while Dean pulls Evangeline, yanks her with him towards the "back of the church" in whatever direction he deems might be appropriate.

"Fickle, fickle. Crowds are always fickle," says Evangeline, nodding her head sagely, like there's a lever in her neck. "I need my _bag. _It's new."

OOO

"Zombies don't drive."

Dean puts his foot on the gas. _Right._

"Are you going to drive through them? Ah, good plan. Big truck. Can I play a tune?"

Truth be told, he doesn't really know what he's doing, except that there is absolute _madness _going down in front of the church and he has to get away from that. Gunfire, screaming, the Undead seemingly pouring from everywhere. What did they do, sprout up like grotesque plants?

The air smells of blood and fresh offal. Those birds are already around, circling, waiting for the melee to calm. The gash in the sky's closed up_. _You'd think the angels would try to grab the scroll now but he guesses not. It's still in a warded box and heaven's holding up the metaphorical middle finger.

"Oh God, I killed them all," says Evangeline, brightly. He can sense that she's at the fringe between reality and the happy-place her head injury seems to have sent her into, and he hopes she doesn't cross that bridge till they're out of here. "I'm going to hell."

_Aren't we all?_

A group of Undead break from the general crowd and starts staggering in their direction. Now that he's looking, Dean can see it. The devil's mark on them. It even _glows._ Classy.

"Rabbits in the headlights," mutters Evangeline. "Sick, crazy rabbits and we gonna motor over their heads. Should I tell my dick-wad angel to tell God we're sorry?"

_I would help, _says the Voice. _If I could._

Dean thinks it should shut its pie-hole if it's just going to sit in a corner and sulk all night like the lone wallflower at the world's douchiest prom, but doesn't say it—(_think it; whatever)—_because he has bigger problems. Undead Army headed his way. Mad girl prophet muttering weird stuff next to him. Not to mention, the truck's gas is kinda low. He hopes it'll make it out of town.

_(that they'll make it out of town)_

"That guy is supposed to be dead, but he's not. Look. You know that guy."

He does.

_What the fuck? _It's been a few years, but he remembers Andy Gallagher's evil twin. They were in Guthrie, Oklahoma and Andy had put a bullet in the guy. Dean doesn't remember his name, and he wasn't on the side of the angels even then, but _he's supposed to be dead_. Not strutting around looking like he was commanding the army.

"What's he doin?"

_Isn't that the sixty-four dollar question._

"He's got some mojo, and he ain't dead. Or Undead," quips Evangeline, and reaches to turn on the radio. Nothing there but static.

_(station's attuned to ghosts) _

Dean watches the kid standing calm and composed in the midst of the pandemonium. The Undead Army surges around him, and he's like the magnet

_(freak magnet)_

holding them all to the purpose. Because this: the Undead congregating somewhere, attacking something, evading gunfire and knives- this organization is not natural to them.

Evangeline, poor girl, latches onto his thoughts and sings. "_I'm callin' all the freaks, from the freak, freak planet, I'm a freak magnet_," and Dean looks at her and thinks _you should really stop now, _and that's when something lands on their windshield.

It's a woman, and in the gunmetal moonlight, her eyes are whiter than white. Blonde hair, matted and tangled, sticks to her scalp in clumps. Bits of her are missing though. She has no lower jawbone, for one. A full set of upper teeth—chipped and broken, but still full—but nothing to bite down against, but she's still trying. Low gurgles rip from her throat, and then she swings back her arm and brings her fist down against the windshield.

Evangeline screams.

The glass doesn't shatter, but a spiderweb of cracks appear there, and in the next instant there's suddenly another one on their windshield, a large man, and Dean knows they're in trouble. But then he raises his fist, about to rain glass down on them, and suddenly _stops._

So does the woman, and he can see her go unnaturally still, alert, listening to something.

The words are slow in making their way to him but they do, strings tugging at his brain, phantoms shaping themselves into letters, and it smells of phantom sulfur. _Keep the prophet girl alive, _he hears. _Kill everything else._

_Snap, _and the strings break; and he thinks _no no I'm not going to obey X-man over there, _but it doesn't even seem to work on him. Like Sam, he's suddenly immune to it or something. Everything seems to slow; the zombie's fist crashes through the windshield with an almost musical sound, and there's glass everywhere, but Dean reaches out and grabs the Undead guy, swipes him across the face and sends him tipping off the hood. He's still wrestling with the jawless woman when he realizes that they're nearly surrounded.

Then there's a burst of fire- _(a flamethrower, what the heck)- _and all the Undead scatter. Evangeline screams as the passenger-side door is thrown open, but it's just Patrick, and he throws himself inside and yells, "Go, just go!"

Dean steps on the gas. They do look like rabbits in headlights, all those crazy things throwing themselves senselessly at the truck, and he does motor right over them. Evangeline keeps yelling but he tunes her out, tunes her out entirely, and the truck isn't responding to him properly-

_(the dead don't drive)_

- and they nearly swerve off the road and into a copse of trees, careening dangerously to one side on two wheels, but he manages to correct their course just in time, the truck landing hard on all fours, and he hears Patrick yell, "_Are you crazy, give me the fucking wheel!" _but there's no time.

He twists the wheel around and a couple of zombies go flying, a couple go under and leave biological splatters behind, but they're all mostly too busy looking at the church to worry about zombie roadkill. Busy looking at the fire, the shots ringing out. The bells keep tolling but he thinks this time they're calling for help, only the other towns nearby are all out of any help to give.

Evangeline whimpers. Patrick grits his teeth together, but folds her into his arms, and tosses the scroll-box onto the top of the dashboard.

The last they see of Brockton, North Carolina is the kid in the rear-view mirror, the kid who was supposed to be dead and buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

The kid watching them leave with yellow ringing his black irises.

* * *

**A/N part two: _I know it looks like I might be throwing too many variables at you, but do stick with me? _**_Got a plan that will make it all make sense :D If you've enjoyed reading, please consider leaving a review. They're like candy._


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: This is the last chapter of Part 1 of this story, which basically means I'm done heaping mystery upon mystery on you, and dishing out some answers :D Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed so far, it means a LOT. I wish I could thank you all by name but I don't know if that's allowed :) But a special thanks to LeeMarieJack, who's been very sweet to me. **

**My betas, supernarttu and T, helped so much with this chapter. It was a hot mess when I sent it to them, and they've whipped it up into something I love. I love you lots :)**

**In my LJ, I also have a post about the various inspirations for this story, if anyone wants to take a look. Happy reading, and I'll see you for Part Two soon :)**

**Warnings: language, violence, self-harm, disturbing imagery**

**Chapter Summary: Wherein Dean and his travelling companions get stuck in a dog-surrounded Texaco, and Dean goes looking for answers in his own head.**

* * *

_The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one;_

_The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels._

_As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world._

_Matthew 13:32 -39 _

Patrick is driving and Pink Floyd is blaring through the tinny car speakers and if Dean closes his eyes and pretends that there is glass over their windshield, no prophet girl curled up against his shoulder, no smell of cheap cigarettes and stale sweat, and most importantly, that the person behind the wheel is his brother, he can _almost _pretend it's the Impala.

Almost.

Almost isn't good enough, not by a long shot.

They're motoring over a motionless desert, a tableaux of a world with the people-shaped spaces unfilled, a giant wasteland the likes of which would better fit a sci-fi lunar landscape. Empty automobiles abandoned in gutters, supermarket trolleys filled with supplies sitting forlorn in the midst of roads, billboards unglued and flapping in the hot, dry wind. Signposts twisted and the words darkened with blood or ink, the occasional dead person hanging out of a window or curled up innocently on the side of the road as if asleep, and a cyclorama of home after gutted home, some with doors still intact, others with every door and window gaping open in a silent scream. It looks like a giant celestial child has discarded all his toys in haphazard fashion, then stepped on the dollhouse, then burned half of it down.

Patrick plays the music _loud. _Filling up the silence, thinks Dean, but he imagines it spilling out of the speakers, making its way into the world, tucking itself into the nooks and crannies as if it is a soundtrack to this new world. _Let's build a new world and fill it up with classic rock. Just because we can._

"Where are we going?"

It's the first words anyone's spoken since Brockton, and Patrick has to bite it out.

"You told me he'd stop the shit happening with the angels back home, Evie, but now they're all dead and we ran away like frightened _cowards_."

Evangeline opens one eye. "The angel said we had to leave," she says quietly, as if she's been rehearsing it in her head, repeating it over and over. _Say it till you believe it._ "That it was important. That the world was- was bigger than Brockton. Bigger than- than just us and that we could…that we could _save _it."

Patrick slams a fist against the wheel and nearly drives them all off the Interstate. "Save it, save the world! We can't even save our own people. We _ran away, _Evangeline. We should have stayed. We should have _stayed. You,_" this last is directed at Dean and he looks at Patrick, "Who the hell are you, really? I told her you were trouble. I told her bringing an Undead into the church is gonna cause hell. I was _right, _wasn't I, Evie? I was right. Everyone is dead, and I was right. Shit."

Evangeline flinches and looks at her knees. "I thought I was doin' the right thing…"

Patrick laughs, bitterly. "Well, you obviously weren't because now we _don't even know where we're going! _Maybe Abe was right, and you _were_ talking to the Devil. Huh, Evie?"

She gapes at him, stricken. Looks to Dean. What's he supposed to do, make a speech? She got him into the mess in the first place. It isn't like he wanted to be the catalyst that helped kill a whole town.

He looks at his arm, the word written there. He just wants to find Sam.

"Abe was a demon. He was watchin' me, waitin' for me to make a decision about the scroll," Evangeline says, and its hard to hear her over the rush of wind, she's speaking quietly, like she's afraid she might break if she were any louder. "He was gonna cut my eye out."

Patrick does a double-take and stares at her, and they avoid a divider by inches. Kid shouldn't be allowed behind a wheel. "_Cut your eye out? 'The _fuck does he wanna do that for? _"_

"I've read the scroll. I dunno what it says, but I can reproduce it. They got magic, I think, enough to get the story from my eyes. Didn't even need both, Abraham said. Just one."

"Okay," Patrick says, with a nervous laugh-cough, and Dean knows he's going to let the weird-ass magic-eye-comment slide, "What does the scroll say?"

"It's a map. Kind of like a map, or maybe a prophecy, I don't know," says Evangeline, shakily. "To where he's hidin', away from Michael's army."

"Hiding? Who's hiding?"

_Lucifer, _says the Voice, just as Evangeline says the same thing.

Dean looks out at the flitting landscape.

"Why would L-_Lucifer_ hide?"

"Because Michael called on the host of heaven, and the host of heaven is too large," Evangeline answers. "He needs to build his army. There are rumors he's in the Southwest, angels are searchin' Arizona, but I've also heard…Midwest."

_Midwest. Detroit. It'll always end in Detroit._

"Devil's hiding till his industry takes off," snorts Patrick. "Nice. Where are we going, Evie?"

And even though Dean is still staring outside— at the staggering Undead grasping the trail of blood-scent from their truck and following after them, at the ones too far gone to even try, at the world grey and bleached like the Asphodel Field he's seen in pictures in long-ago esoteric books— he can feel Evangeline's gaze on him.

He can _feel _what she's going to say before she says it.

"The angel said," says Evangeline, in a rush of breath, "that we need to find Mister Winchester's brother. That we gotta go north."

"There are _two _of them?" Patrick sighs, incredulously. He looks like he wants to ask more questions, but shuts up and turns into I-77 anyway, and Dean is glad.

OOO

It starts raining a few hours later, when they reach Mercer County. Rain and thunder, claps of it so loud that it's some whole new experience. Lightning falls in monstrous streaks from the sky and turns the world black and white, into Polaroid snapshots.

The highway gleams before them, a bolt of black ribbon stretched across the length of the world, wet and dark and smooth. Dean has a strange thought that it looks rather like some giant surfacing cetacean mammal; one of those that never wanted to go through the pain of evolution and see the wonders of the land. He thinks of the mass suicides that littered the newspapers that Patrick showed him, all of them people like narwhals and porpoises, heading into the final dark sea instead of facing the world.

Suckass metaphor, and he'll be damned if he figured out how the words _cetacean _fucking _mammal _ever made its way into his brain. He's not Sam Winchester, Child Prodigy now, is he?

"Texaco up ahead," Evangeline says. "We have to stop."

"I don't think there could be any gas there, Evie."

"We have to _stop."_

Patrick and Dean both look at her. "Fine," Patrick grits out. "It's not like we're not gonna run outta gas soon anyway. Might as well not run out in the middle of nowhere."

_Everything's the middle of nowhere,_ thinks Dean, but doesn't find it fit to share the wisdom at the moment. He hopes there are guns in the service station. Knives even, and maybe food. The kid has been grumbling long enough about _hunger._ It's curious enough that Dean doesn't feel anything of the sort at the moment, as if along with some returning slivers of rational thinking, his wild craving for sustenance has melted away. Thinking of food brings thoughts of the hunter back in that haunted, charred, fire-blackened town where all this began, and Dean doesn't want to think of that.

Thoughts like that are pernicious; a slow haunting.

The truck comes to a stop near the big red Texaco pentacle. The station isn't large: just a couple of gasoline pumps and a small store with a corrugated tin roof. The rain patters against the roof loudly, and water pools on the steps leading upto the screen door. There are crates blocking the door but no signs of a scuffle anywhere and when Patrick pushes at the crates, they scatter to the ground easily. Behind them, the door isn't even locked.

Dean is the first one in. The inside of the store smells of motor oil, old menthols and a layer of dust. There are a few shelves of canned goods, aspirin in a bottle, Pop-Tarts and bright strips of chewing gum. There's oil and a couple of wheel rims and bottles of transmission fluid. One wall is taken over by pin-up cuties, another by fishing rigs, and behind a glass display case, trinkets from Taiwan and Korea catch dust.

"Nothing's been here since the virus started. I wonder why?" Evangeline says, prying open a can of Tom Yum soup.

Patrick knocks over a carton and snorts when a couple of red and white bottles go rolling out. "World's dead but there's still Diet Dr. Pepper."

There's a tiny door built into a recess in the wall and Dean pushes it open to find a box of a restroom. A flick of a switch and a little, naked bulb comes on, throwing grimy yellow light on a rust-stained sink and a toilet that has seen many, many better days. The mirror in the bathroom has a word on it. M-A-R-Y in red lipstick. But then he sees that the mirror is just part of it. The name is all over the bathroom, scrawled with increasing despair, scratched into the tiles, the ceramic of the sink.

_Mary, Mary, Mary, My Name is Mary. _

Intelligent girl, Dean thinks, looking at his own forearm that still says SAM in wonky, titled letters.

It's easy enough to lose your own name in this world.

He wipes the name off the mirror and looks at himself. Or tries, at least, because it's hard to focus. There's a cut on his forehead oozing black into his hair and neck, his face looks gaunter than the face he remembers from memory, and his color is pretty ashen. Not to mention stained with ten kinds of grime. He looks like—well, _like a zombie-movie reject_, and that's the lamest comparison in the history of all lame comparisons. Someone give him an award for coming up with these things.

On graver notes though, he does look like himself. Save for bloodshot eyes and general _not-himself-ness_. He can't explain it. It's not something easy to pick out, not a physical feature exactly but something else, hard to get at, like the last bit of marrow in the crack of a bone.

Maybe _lostness, _if that's even a word_._

Dean runs the tap and there's still water. It pools in the dirty basin and he holds his palms underneath, flinching at the feel of the water running over his skin. And then he _doesn't _flinch, because _goddamn it_ _this feels_ _good. _He could stay here forever. Bits of dirt and blood detach in curious little clods off his skin and goes exploring new territories in the world below the drain. He cocks his head to the side and watches them…frolic.

_Frolic._ Okay, losing his mind now.

But what this whole happy jaunt leads to is Dean pulling off the tattered, blood-stained jacket and the old bandages still wrapped around that bullet wound— Jesus, it seems _forever _ago but it wasn't, now, was it?— and dropping it on the ground, and he'll have to do something to the grey T-shirt as well now that the concept of _water_ has him excited like a kid on a cocktail of crack and candy, but then he catches sight of something in the mirror and stops.

_What are they, letters?_

Letters. Inked into his skin.

They peek out from beneath the edge of his shirt, and he can't read them. No surprise, since it's fucking _Enochian._ Good that he has a prophet then. His Lady Luck is eternally late to the party, but at least she isn't dead.

Evangeline and Patrick are by the window when he makes his way to them, peering out through the tattered old blinds. Other than the rain, the silence is loud enough that it congeals, thickly, like old blood.

"Letters?" asks Evangeline, tuning into mental radio. She turns to stare at him.

"We've got worse problems," says Patrick. "Like those _dogs. _Evie, I'm really not a fan of your angel now, okay? Tell him to reset his buttons, because I think he's definitely on _Fuck You All _right now._"_

Evangeline shakes her head. "He says we should wait."

"Yeah, like hell we should. You getting a load of this, dummy? Look. Cujo invasion."

Outside, the sky is a weird hyacinth, and black shadows surround the Texaco. Lightning illuminates strips of matted fur and bloody muzzles. When the rumbling stops for a second, Dean can hear snarls and pants, pattering footfalls.

"You a dog person?"

Dean guesses quite emphatically that he is _not._

Evangeline wrings her hands together. "We have to stay here. It's imperative. He's kind of shrieking at me."

It's not like they have a choice. He'd rather be a sitting duck than dog meat.

And for all his bravado and big talk, Patrick just folds his arms and harrumphs. "Do we ever catch a fucking break? Half the day I've been mowing down them zombie slugs, no offense to _you, _and now there are, like, _dogs," _he laughs, a bit hysterically, and then starts kicking a can around.

_A deus ex machina would be welcome about now, _thinks Dean. He strides over to the wall of pin-up cuties, because there's this one picture that's almost…familiar. Well, not the _girl_ in it, though he wouldn't have minded that kind of familiarity much—pretty brunettes are pretty— but something else. Like, ah, like an egg-yolk wall in some diner and a pot of black coffee on his table and watching Sam bark out a giant order of hash-browns and sausages and black beans (which is apocalyptic in itself, _Sam _doing that) turning his head to the calendar on the wall, and putting laser focus on the curvy girl in it.

It's beyond frustrating, the inane things he remembers sometimes.

"Letters?" Evangeline asks again, coming up to him now.

He turns to her, but she has her eyes closed. She's breathing in and out, quick, and as he watches, she slides down to the floor and sits there. And then she opens her eyes and sighs, her whole frame slumping into something simple and breakable.

"When I started hearin' him first, my Mama said _you just do what he says, Evie, and everythin' will be right as rain. _We'd a trailer, you know, it was just her an' me, she taught me things. Angels always good. Devil's a bad egg. There goes one quarter in a Mason jar from my pocket money if I said the Lord's name in vain, a slap for droppin' my "g's". And _you listen to the angel, Evie._ Always said that, she did. You listen to him, 'cause he's a messenger of the Lord is what he is, he ain't gonna make a mistake. That's what I thought when the trailer burned with her in it too. _He ain't gonna make a mistake. _If she dies, it's 'cause she gotta die."

She looks at him again and smiles a little, a watery grin.

"And there you are, thinkin' _angels are dick bags. _Sometimes you think very funny things, Mister Winchester._"_

Dean's sitting against the counter now, facing her. Patrick paces, restless. He's probably the only sane one amongst them now. Pacing is a much better course of action than anything else they're doing. The prophet is soliloquizing, the zombie is wondering about long ago, mildly improbable breakfasts, the dogs are pit-pattering through the pit-pattering rain. Sounds like the start of a hideous joke.

"My point being that—you know—I'm unreliable. Like what they say that narrator is, in _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. _That's an Agatha Christie novel. I read a lot of Agatha Christie—_sorry_— my point is that, maybe the thing in my head's a monster with claws. Maybe it's really _evil. _Maybe _I'm _an agent of evil."

And honestly, what's Dean going to say to that? Last time he remembers that he ran into angels, Sam had barely made it out alive without coughing up his intestines and his half-brother had gotten stuck as Michael's vessel.

The air's grown stale and cold—well, staler and colder—and Dean thinks _wind, _Dean thinks _cold spots, _Dean thinks _whatever. _Dean thinks he's already gone one round with clairvoyant what-ifs. One round with _maybe the thing in my head is evil._ One round with _I'm a freak, you have to kill me._ He's not having it again. All the freaks better get Zen real soon. Kill the what-ifs dead and focus on the what-now's.

"Letters. That's a what-now."

Dean pushes the neck of his shirt away from his skin to show her. Evangeline frowns, her forehead collapsing into furrows, biting her lip.

"I dunno what that is, Mister Winchester, but I'd hazard a guess and call it a ward of some sort. Like a wall, blocking something out."

_A ward. _Against what? Against a whole passel of things, he could imagine, because what hasn't he seen? His whole life his family's been a hurricane lamp that variegated blood-thirsty moths floated to. Sometimes they swayed, flickered out, burned brighter: no matter, it didn't drive away the moths.

Look here now, how they bother him even after he should technically be dead. Anything from Romero to Spielberg would be completely clear on the definition of something _Undead. _A zombie is a zombie, right? Hell, he and Sam have gunned those bastards down before, before all this became a Rapture monkey's wet-dream gone ridiculously awry. Zombies die, zombies wake up, zombies make other zombies who also die before they become, you know, actual _zombies._

But not _this._ There's something just so _odd _about all this.

Something he can't grasp. Something _obvious._

And really, that's the whole issue— a million dollars to his resident fluctuating genius for figuring it out— that there is something so _obvious_ here that he's not getting it. _Are you getting it, Evangeline? _Because he's not.

"Do you remember anything about this? Like, who drew it on you, something like that?"

He doesn't. Isn't that weird how he remembers random pin-up girls (Miss September, he's sure) but not a fucking Enochian ward carved on his _skin?_

"Maybe that's it, Mister Winchester. What you _don't _remember rather than what you _do. _Maybe that's the _obvious_ thing you're missing."

She's right.

Dean realizes this in a flurry of thoughts so random and bright that it plays loud arpeggios in his brain. That's the common denominator to everything he's been remembering, isn't it? Adam and Sam in the panic room, the knife through Zachariah: he remembers that. Jo and Ellen ceasing to exist in an inferno that sears heat straight into Dean's soul; half of everything that he files under hope ceasing to exist much later in Bobby's house when gentle flames blacken the edges of their "usual suspects line-up" picture: he remembers that. And then this one snapshot that came to him back in the church, when Amazing Grace was being played, that snapshot of the Impala under the rain and the motel room and thinking that _this is what it feels like to just give up._

"But nothing after the virus broke out?" Evangeline asks. Dean looks at her sharply, and she flushes. "I'll get out of your head if you want me to. I just want to help. I _need _to help someone right now."

He doesn't know what to say to that, so he thinks simply, _nothing after the virus_. Not the break-out itself, not how he ended up this way, not where Sam went. Though, there's that field he keeps thinking of, the field that comes back to haunt him…

"Do you think," asks Evangeline, her eyes widening, "that maybe the letters, maybe the _ward_ is against your own memories?"

Could it be? Stranger things have happened. Hell, stranger things are happening _right now. _Like Patrick put it, Cujo Invasion. And them holed up in a Texaco together. And the whole weird world with the ash and bugs and dead people and psychic kids.

"Yeah," mumbles Evangeline, scrutinizing the letters again. "It looks like it could be."

But who would do that?

_Don't mess with that, Dean._

He starts and looks around for a moment before realizing that it's the Voice that's spoken. Took it long enough.

Someone said long ago that it's better not to trust things unless you're sure where it keeps its brain. Probably Sam, quoting some ridiculously large text. Winter of '98 there was this case about a schizophrenic girl who kept seeing a ghost with a Glasgow Smile. Turned out she was a psychic seeing one of several of her own possible futures. Dean remembers her saying that all the voices in her head looked like crows, and that they'd sit on her windowsill and tap at the glass. _One for sorrow, two for mirth._ _Don't trust the voices, little dude. _He wasn't even a little dude, nearly nineteen, and she was a twenty-five year old Goth chick who kept eyeing him, but the message was clear.

_Dean, you really shouldn't._

Which of course, means he probably _will. _

"We'll need a counter-ward if we are to break this ward though," muses Evangeline. "You got any idea?"

He does, the solution sparking easily at the back of his mind, but he doesn't think it too hard that Evangeline would pick it up on her freaky telepathic airwaves.

No use freaking the girl out.

OOO

Jimmy Buffett is singing _Stars Fell on Alabama _on repeat on the fancy jukebox Patrick found when Dean locks the restroom door behind him and turns on the naked bulb. Somehow since the last time, the shadows have grown darker in this room, more alive, and now they wriggle restlessly. The mirror too has changed, an almost Wonderland distortion that makes him look garish and frightening. Behind him, damp spreads on the walls like some many-legged creature inching towards prey.

_Moonlight and magnolias, starlight in your hair, all the world a dream come true, did it really happen, was I really there, was I really there…_

Is this stupid? Probably. The ward could be anything, and breaking it could imply _anything._ Perhaps it's all that's keeping him at least partly human. Perhaps breaking it would mean that he'd go rushing out of this box of a room and rip out the throats of the two unfortunate kids outside.

_Your eyes held a tender light, And the stars fell on Alabama last night…_

Could he help it? There's just something about the notion of it being a memory-ward that seems _plausible. _How else could he explain why almost everything had come back to him except for those crucial days after the virus?

Dean tries the knife first. Draws a clear line across the marks with the sharp tip, doesn't even wince once. That doesn't help, though he hadn't really thought it would. A guy could hope, couldn't he? So he flicks open the lighter. Twists bodily away from the flame too- guess that part about zombies being afraid of the fire was right, after all.

And he holds the metal part of the knife to the flame and thinks _this better work. _

This better fucking work.

If there's no counter-spell, he's going to try and _burn_ the marks away.

_…my arms wound around you tight, and the stars fell on Alabama—_

He hears Jimmy Buffett cut off mid-stanza just as the knife begins to glow red-hot. Before the rising wave of irrational, incredible, steamrollering fear of the fire can take him under, he raises the knife to his skin, presses it hard against the lettering.

He grunts and nearly falls over, gritting his teeth against the sizzle of the hot metal against his flesh.

That's not supposed to happen. There's supposed to be no pain.

He never even felt those bullets before, did he? But this hurts like a bitch.

The world becomes miniscule; a box, a pillbox, and all it can contain is the _pain. _It's worse because he's wielding the knife himself, and he can't let go, not yet. He twists his head away from it, squeezes his eyes shut so that the grimy light of the bulb fractures into shards at the corners of his eyelids. The knife is a brand, hot and sharp. The bright red pain seeps even through eyes screwed shut, and he gasps.

Dean grabs for the edge of the sink and leans against it, one knee going down against the floor. He watches as the floor transforms, from wood to stone to a dark forest floor. His fingers curl into the grass but it's like grabbing at air. Grabbing at _ghosts._

_What is this? _

Flashes of bright-colored light pops in his vision. And through it, faces. Voices. A train. The field he keeps dreaming of. Sam, saying, _"I'm not letting this happen to you."_

He's brought back to the present by knuckles rapping against the door, a staccato rhythm of exponential urgency. Knuckles, like a hammer. Evangeline on the other side, saying something.

Dogs. Patrick. _Help._

Dean ignores it. Looks up and at himself in the mirror, the rapidly _disappearing _mirror. Blackness crawls at the edge of his vision and he drops the knife. It clatters against the forest floor—_the restroom tiles_—and in the last slivers of the mirror before it turns into tree-bark, he sees the words on his skin have become unrecognizable, a long red blister.

The Enochian is gone and now all it is, is a broken ward.

From far away: dogs barking. A girl screaming. Something like shelves falling.

In here, the world changes.

The world turns.

It's like that silly magical movie with the forest inside the wardrobe, only _this _forest is occupying a dirty lavatory.

From where he is: a sound, a ringing, but not of bells. One of those musical cymbals. This is maybe a _memory,_ because he can see it merging with other memories. A train, again, tracks that lead to nowhere. Gutted towns. A ghostly version of Sam turns to him and says, _"Over there, I think I see-" _but then he's gone in a wisp of smoke.

Weirdly, again the song starts up, miracled together with this new world and the previous one: _moonlight and magnolias, starlight in your hair… _

Dean appears to be in the fringes of some kind of an imaginary forest. The leaves glitter in gemstone colors, and the ground is littered with pages from hunting journals and esoteric books. There are bullet holes on the trees, smouldering at the point of entry.

From far, far away, he thinks he hears Evangeline- _"Mister Winchester!"- _but she trails away into a scream that takes a weird, sparkly ogive shape and disappears to the back of his mind. There are other sounds here. Cicadas and some strange night-bird's cry, and the next wind brings with it a voice.

A low, screeching gasp of a voice, but it says his name.

_Sammy_, he thinks, and his whole heart lurches in the direction of the voice, but no. This is not real, he knows that. What's real is a Texaco station, and a grimy restroom. No miracles to be found here for Dean Winchester, so he assumes the voice—that Sam voice—is either part of this memory, or his subconscious, or whatever-this-is. Just his brain, playing tricks on him.

_Crash._

Something, in the trees. He twists his head and catches the slightest movement; the edge of a jacket, a flash of silver. Dean turns away from the direction the voice came from, and towards the deeper parts of the woods, hating how it gets louder even if he's moving away from it. And louder still. Maybe a lament, or a song- but it has just one word. _Dean, Dean,Dean._

In a refrain, over and over, tortured.

_Shut up, _he thinks. _Shut up, Sam, and let me remember._

This is not real, he thinks. None of it is real. There's a door in the middle of the forest that opens into a Texaco maybe full of dogs, and someone is rapping knuckles against it, flesh and bones and blood against wood, _tap tap tap. _

That's real. This is not.

_In the centre just you and me, dear; my heart beat like a hammer…And stars fell on Alabama…_

Screaming. The voices are screaming now.

_Voice. _

The only one that matters.

_(you're not here, Sam)_

A flicker of movement in the woods again and this time Dean sees a face- white and small, pinkish eyes that gleam scarlet for a moment, a ghost of a smile on its face. And then it turns and runs.

_(I am dreaming and there are smiling monsters in this dream and maybe there are talking bobble-heads if I want them too.)_

The sound of the cymbals match its footsteps through the woods.

He takes a step and then another, and then he's running after it.

It has answers.

He just _knows._

"NO!" he hears Evangeline yell from somewhere, but doesn't stop.

The branches whip against him, his feet squelch against the wet undergrowth, and he corrals all his strength against blocking the screaming in his head, the Sam-voice still screaming; the _Dean, Dean, please you have to come back_ litany that slams against his thoughts and twists his insides.

The thing he follows is something not quite human, a shape that's here now and not here a moment later, a tiny white blip against the monochrome dark of rain-swollen trees. He is flesh and confusion, slamming against trees with the twisted grace of an amputee dancer, as if blinded amidst a room of mirrors, and it could sneak up on him from any side, and that's why he has to stop.

_He has to stop._

He stops.

Because he realizes, suddenly, that it could jump him while he cruises aimlessly through the forest, that it could rend him apart with its thoughts alone, whatever it was, strew the fruits of its labor into this darkness, and then he'll never find Sam.

_Be rational. _

He stops and looks around, searching for a sign of it, but finds only grey shadows, the static buzz of cicadas, and a stench of rot. And the screaming: the screaming is still there. That's not going away too easily.

Between the crooked branches of two trees that seem to be embracing, all tangled together in passionate mutation, Dean finds the little white person. Around its neck is a pair of small cymbals that keeps clapping together. It is oddly, horribly white, sickly pale as something drowned and shocking in its luminosity. As he watches, its smile grows impossibly wide. It spreads across its jaw in a crimson line, all the way to its ears, like its face has been slashed ear-to-ear.

A Glasgow smile.

Dean thinks, with a bit of whimsy that should have been dead and buried in Kansas years ago: _my, what big teeth you have_.

Ivory, with the sweet crookedness of a child's milk teeth.

He finds he can speak. This isn't reality, after all.

"What are you?"

The thing says, in an insect chirrup, "You have a hole inside you."

He takes another step towards it. Tries not to be threatening and thinks he probably fails. "Yeah? Think you can fill it, maybe?"

"Oh, but I _know_ I can_," _it says, looking at him with unreal red-pink eyes. It seems excited. "I can show you so many things. Where your heart should be, there's a hole. I can help you fill it up. I can show you the start of time and the end of time, I can show you the face of God, I can show you the smallest creatures with the tallest dreams, and the storm in every raindrop. If you want to see. You know what I am."

"Boo Radley in drag?" Dean tries, weakly, with a laugh-cough. His heart is hammering. "I've met you before."

_(made him uncomfortable then too)_

The thing looks _pleased. _"Yes. We've met before. I looked different then though. That happens, sometimes. Sometimes I'm a crow and sometimes I'm a vulture. Sometimes I'm a man. I was one when we met, and so were you."

Dean holds its red-pink gaze. "But I don't know where we met. You'll have to show me where."

The thing, when it speaks, speaks in a voice like thunder and dragons and soft, flapping insect wings. " You've broken a ward to find me. It was there for a reason."

"_Fine. _Tell me the reason, then. I need to know. I need to know where my brother is."

The top of its head drops back, a lid opened wide. And from within the giant mouth something like smoke pours out, white and thick and sweeping down to the forest floor. The cymbals clap, but the girl-the _it-_ has disappeared amidst the mist, and Dean moves back as the mist slides over the ground, tendrils of it curling around twigs and dead leaves, inexorably making its way to him.

He backs up against a tree- _the sink, _fuck it, _the SINK- _and everything is crimson and black now, the mist fading out the world.

In that mist are stories, tall enough to hang from the edge of the moon, and each of them is true.

Somewhere in reality, in a dog-surrounded Texaco station, the door opens with a horrific, resounding crash that shatters the mirror, the trees, the whatever-it-is. Dean can hear dogs. He thinks he catches a glimpse of a man in black and another in a neon jacket, a faint smell of whiskey and bourbon, and Evangeline with a gag around her mouth.

It doesn't matter, though it's supposed to. It can wait, right?

He concentrates on the song instead.

_We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white…_

The mist wraps around him, drags him down.

_And the stars fell on Alabama last night…_

He turns his eyes away from the squirming grey tendrils of it, looks up, and into darkness that may as well go on forever.

**A/N part two: The lyrics used here are from Jimmy Buffett's version of The Stars Fell on Alabama. Please consider leaving a review if you enjoyed the story!**


	6. Chapter 6

_**Author's Note**__: OMG, guys, I know. It's been FOREVER since an update. Real life just sucks, I'm trying to pass my final year and get a job and find a good place to do my PG and blah blah, and there has been NO TIME AT ALL. Some of you were so kind to check up on me, thank you so much for your interest and concern. Some of your stories I have yet to read, I promise I will as soon as life is a bit less hectic._

_Okay, this chapter is kind of different because it takes place in a different time-period to the rest of the story and as such it CAN BE READ SEPARATELY. Yes, that's right, no need to slough through 21k words of fic to read this, but of course, those 21k words are important to get the total picture and emotions. _

_Leave me comments please? It helps me write faster!_

_WARNINGS: As always, language. *grin* And disturbing imagery. And explosions._

_Extra Notes at the end of the chapter regarding disclaimer-y stuff._

* * *

INTERLUDE- PART ONE

_Crushed and Filled With All I Found_

_Underneath and Inside, Just to Come Around_

_More, give me more, give me more_

- Fever Ray, "If I Had A Heart"

When Dean closes his eyes to the Texaco and the dogs, Evangeline and the world, the song and the mist—for a second all he sees is Sam.

_Blink._

Dean closes his eyes and there he is: standing alone at the edge of the water, watching the sea shatter to foam on black rocks, the wind teasing his hair into wild shapes, his back turned to Dean. He's saying something but Dean can't hear him over the wind, which is a wild, loose thing that shrieks and squabbles.

_Blink._

Dean closes his eyes and they're in a warehouse, the floor of it covered in so many overlapping sigils and circles and symbols from a mish-mash of so many cultures. Dean's hand is on Sam's, pulling him away from something, and the warehouse is disintegrating around them.

_Blink._

Dean closes his eyes and they're somewhere dark, in something that rattles—a train?—and he's squinting to watch Sam sleep. His eyes burn from sleeplessness but he can't close them yet. He has to keep watch. He has to watch over his brother. They're each other's keeper, and it's like a cosmic unwritten rule. He's squinting in the dark and watching, and he's also scrubbing at blood. There's blood. There's always blood, isn't there? Too much of it and too less wonder.

And then he's standing in front of a blue trailer with pots of roses lining the path to its door.

The door to the trailer is not open, but he knows that if he were to put out his hand and try the knob, it'll swing inward, and he'll look into something that he probably doesn't want to see.

_(but he has to see)_

Around him, the world is a rich autumnal spread. Oaks, knobbed with October, blazing orange. Bright flame before winter deadness, like life itself. He's always liked orange. Pumpkin pie and Halloween and chrysanthemums and maple leaves. The color of the house fire at age four, the shade of life changing. Orange is bright; demanding. Something that sears itself into your mind, something to _remember._ Unlike his life, and Sam's, and every other hunter's. They're all bookmarks stuck in the worst chapters of normal people's lives.

"Are you gonna stand around thinking nonsense thoughts forever? Jesus, Dean. The world's kind of ending, if you hadn't noticed."

His head whips around and finds Sam, sitting on the hood of a red truck that wasn't there before, long legs dangling over the side. He looks oddly comfortable there, smiling, the golden-orange light spilling around him, perhaps _into _him. His eyes are light, the way they get when he's particularly content. Good books do that to him. Big new words—shit like _plesiosaurus _or _pareidolia_—sometimes do that to him. Those rare interludes, those days of aimless driving in between hunts sometimes do that to him.

Sam and his chameleon eyes.

"Where the hell did you go?" mutters Dean, because as long as he's dreaming, he might as well find some answers.

Sam shrugs. "I thought finding out is why you went to the trouble of breaking the ward. But now you're lolling around _here _instead of going in _there," _he points to the trailer.

Dean looks at it. At the rust showing through flaking paint on its sides, an old calendar flip-flapping against the window, the cinder block steps that lead up to the door. It looks like something that'll hold in a lot of misery. As if rusted tin cans had gotten too small for all the fucking miseryand it came to live in a light blue trailer in the middle of nowhere.

"Dean," says Sam, annoyed, both eyebrows employed in full power of disapproval, "Stop with the _poetry._"

"What's in there? Are you in there?"

Sam makes a face. "You don't like riddles, and I don't know how to answer that without making a riddle out of it. Maybe you should just go in."

"Yeah, you're a fat lot of help, Sam," complains Dean, and kicks at a stone with self-righteous childishness. But he takes a step forward, then another, feeling like the red-shirt chick at the start of a teen slasher flick, until he's finally at the cinder block steps. He turns around to look behind him but the autumn is gone, the leaves are gone, and so are the truck and Sam. There's nothing behind him but the flower pot lined path he'd just walked, and the white refrigerator lying on its side one step behind him.

"Can't hang around for one goddamn minute," he grumbles, and gives the doorknob a mighty turn.

It swings open and the world goes a blinding, suffocating white. There's nothing anywhere: no sky and no ground, no buildings, no murmuring voices. There's a man on a pale horse though, tall and regal. His eyes burn with agelessness and some sheer dark power, his sword cleaves the world in two, he screams out something in a voice that would move mountains—

—and now, with electric clarity, he watches Sam drag a scalpel over a body and draw black blood—

—"World's ending," a man tells Dean, sagely. He's wearing a flowery apron and smiling through a mouth full of broken teeth, "and there ain't nothing you can do to stop it."

_Beginnings are arbitrary if the end is known, aren't they?_

Might as well begin here.

OOO

_Macon, Georgia_

_Nine Months Ago_

"World's ending," Preston Vale tells Dean Winchester through a mouth full of broken teeth, "and there ain't nothing you can do to stop it."

Dean gives him a wide, brilliant smile and blows a hole through his head.

"Watch me try," he sneers.

The yellow incandescence of the roadhouse flickers once, fades to a fragile glow and then dies. He can hear the generator giving up in the backyard- a mewling, oddly human sound that he didn't know generators could make. Outside, thunder whickers and lightning splits the sky, and the world is mostly dark from the storm and the consequent power blackout. It's one of those purple-dark nights when everything seems sharp and frayed.

He grabs his knife from where it clattered to the ground during the fight, giving the still-clean blade a cursory wipe against his jacket. Inside the roadhouse, the air reeks of blood and death and dust. The last spills all over the tables, the floor, the glasses behind the counters.

The rest is his own doing.

There are at least six dead people in here. All of them ex-demons, all of them who Dean had interrogated in the hope of knowing where the Devil was hiding. He'd exorcised five of the demons, and watched five of those people die screaming immediately afterwards, and what were the chances that Preston Vale would defy the odds? None to astronomical? Best to let the poor bastard go quick, though Sam would probably disagree if he were here.

But he's not. He's back at the motel room, and Dean doesn't have to be a psychic to exactly see it in his mind's eye. Dark fell long ago, but Sam's probably not turned on the lights. He's firmly ensconced in the halo of his laptop's clean liquid-crystal light, typing, building sentences that run into each other, taking meandering notes, checking the four horsemen rings still in their drawstring pouch: waiting, waiting, for the other shoe to drop.

There has to be a reason why the pause button's been hit on the apocalypse and Lucifer has disappeared and Sam's determined to find out.

"Any luck?" asks Sam, when Dean calls him.

"Abandoned roadhouse full of dead demons and I've got nothing," Dean says, sighing. "You?"

"I have a seventeen-year-old girl's blog. She liked parties."

Dean can hear the sound of laptop keys while he tries to process if this is new information or some kind of mental snap. "And? Something nabbed her?"

"She _liked_ parties. Now she's the new Jim Jones. You hear about _Creation Falling?"_

"No?"

"They're a new cult. Based off Warwick, headed by seventeen-year-old Mercy Weeds."

"And why is this important?"

"I'll tell you en route. We're going to Rhode Island right now."

Standing on a slushy side road that splits off from the highway and veers through cypress-darkened , wind-whipped land, Lafferty's Roadhouse is older than the Civil War. It's a considerably large establishment: all double-paned glass and a mansard roof, a building that has the bored, smug look of a pretentious patrician. Dean thinks it was probably a brothel at first. Then a speakeasy, then a roadhouse, then an abandoned store house, now a site of murder.

Cattails whip against Dean's jeans while he makes his way to the highway. The weather's acting weird. It's Georgia, and it's summer, and this can't be normal behavior.

Bobby rings while Dean waits for Sam, and there's still no news on the Devil's whereabouts. "How's Sam doing?" he asks, and Dean says, "Fine, we're just fine," and Bobby grunts, like, _yeah right._ It's kind of strange how Dean's even going along with this _finding the devil _quest. If a pause has been hit on the apocalypse, that's good, right? They should buy a farm and spend this interlude raising chickens or something. Instead they're chasing after Lucifer so Sam can lock him up with the horsemen rings, which doesn't spell anything good for Sam from any angle. But this is still the only plan, even after two months. Sam seems determined to stick to it, get it all over as fast as possible. It's screwed up, even Dean can see that.

"How's Cas?"

"Mourning his wings. I swear he's worse than a prom-queen. 'Least prom queens are pretty."

"He's still entirely human?"

Bobby snorts. "Down to the last shaving cut."

They talk about Revelation omens: the count since a month ago has been exactly zero. Chuck has had no headaches. He's penning a Tolkienesque fantasy while waiting for the next one. He wants aliens in it too, but Bobby says that's an impossibility. Dean doesn't think so. Goblins could as well be aliens. Dean misses pie and Bobby misses bacon and Chuck gave Cas the number for someone called Mistress Magda, whose conversational preferences on the phone confuses Cas to no small extent. There are three hunters dead, but only from getting sloppy with a wendigo.

"You take care of yourself now, boy," says Bobby gruffly, "and maybe you should bash that idea into your idiot brother too. He's a little low on self-preservation, that one."

Dean's still thinking about that and the horsemen rings—both hoping they'd disappear just like Lucifer and thankful that they've got them all— when the Impala turns the corner, rain-slicked and subtle as a heart-attack. Something weird is on the radio.

Sam turns it off and turns to Dean as he climbs in. His eyes are bright with discovery.

"I think we're onto something," he says, and Dean sighs and settles back into the seat while the world passes by in a blur.

Obviously, the chicken-farm will have to wait.

_Warwick, Rhode Island_

_Two Days Later_

Creation Falling.

From Sam's notes, Dean gathers that they're basically a new apocalyptic cult. Mercy Weeds, who heads it, believes that she's one of the two witnesses mentioned in the Book of Revelations, 11:3. Sam thinks he believes _her,_ because she's basically got all the facts right. Seals and Lilith and the angels of apocalypse and who Sam and Dean Winchester are. The roles they played and the roles they'll play.

It's on her fucking blog.

"Can't you take it down?" Dean asks, outraged. He stares at his breakfast and feels still more scandalized: the hash-browns and bacon are making him queasy after seeing his own name on the _internet._

"No. Believe me, I tried. For a blog it's rather well-protected," says Sam, yawning. He's still waiting for his coffee and looks decidedly less than half-alive. A wing of hair flops across his forehead and buries one eye. He's gazing at the fly-speckled window of the diner, and his eyes are light. It's a good day, then.

"She's got _mug shots_ of us_._ Oh, did you read this, Sammy? '_There are multiple accounts of the Winchesters dying, but each time they seem to crop up again, like an untamable virus._' What the hell does she mean,untamable _virus?!_"

Sam grins. "But can you blame her, Dean? She's only writing the truth."

"Well, then, the truth's a bitch," growls Dean, attacking his bacon with his fork, "I don't even look good in this stupid photo, and there are _four hundred _people on this blog _right now. _I look like a marmoset, Sam._"_

Sam brightens as the waitress brings him his coffee.

"Four hundred, really? I wonder why she doesn't go public domain, she's getting enough traffic."

Dean looks at him and wonders how come he's related to this Zen primate.

_Creation Falling_ has its headquarters in Warwick, in a warehouse just off the Narragansett Bay, and Mercy Weeds claims she has close to a hundred followers, if not more.

_This is it,_ her blog keeps proclaiming. _It's The End, and it's already in motion, and there's nothing that can stop it. The Seals are broken, the Devil walks the earth, and Heaven's gathering all arms. This is it._

"You think she'll really know what's going to happen? Why there's a pause?"

Sam shrugs. "She has a high accuracy rate, Dean. Her predictions are all updated on her blog with time-stamps, and they always come true exactly when she says they will. It's kind of spooky. I think it's a definite lead."

"It's like the Anna thing all over again," Dean says, pushing the laptop towards Sam. "Fine. We'll go to her stupid warehouse. I need to educate Mercy Weeds on her metaphors anyway. Untamable virus, I swear..."

Sam's forehead furrows as he gazes at the screen, and then: "_Simile_, Dean" he corrects, dismissively, and Dean nearly chucks the pepper mill at his brother's giant forehead.

Sam peers at the laptop while Dean goes back to his breakfast, after surreptitiously checking his pocket. The rest of their stuff is in the car, but Dean's got the horsemen's rings on him. They take turns carrying it around with them because they're both paranoid the one remaining horseman will want his back. There's got to be an end to the renting period, right?

"Dean," says Sam, his eyes glued to the laptop screen, and something about the tone of his voice suggests that they're not gonna be hanging around long enough for Dean to grab one of those English muffins that he just glimpsed on another table.

OOO

Tick tock.

This is how it begins, with a race to a warehouse and a girl who they never saw alive, but who ended up mattering anyway.

_"I-ro-ni-cal," _Sam might say, each syllable bled bone-dry of humor.

Remember that it is nine months later in a zombie-infested world and Dean Winchester is only remembering things. Remember that these are layers in his head, infinitely reducing Matryoshka dolls of images that leads to a speck of final truth somewhere inside. All the Matryoshka dolls are crying, and he can't help them because they're painted that way.

Remember that this is not _now _but _then; _and _then _is sometimes scarier if it happens all wrong— if _then _comes after _now _when the _now _is already known, and it is dark with no brothers in it.

_(remember that, remember that) _

Would you really want to remember finding 123 people dead?

Skip channels, shall we?

Sam says, "You're not allowed to do that, Dean."

"I need to get back to some people, Sam," Dean reasons. He's a bit worried about the dogs, and Evangeline, and maybe even Patrick, "We were in the middle of something."

They're in the blue trailer, sitting across from each other, and Sam pushes at his hair and his hand comes away bloody. He stares at the blood and then presses his palm lightly against the tiny, frozen-over window.

"You're not allowed to un-remember. The ward was there for a reason. You broke it."

It's not Sam who says that but a girl in a yellow raincoat, and Dean wonders where she came from. She wasn't there before. He feels cheated.

"Diana's right," mutters Sam.

(_who the fuck is Diana?)_

"Fine," grumbles Dean. There's a slice of pie on the table in front of him and he makes a face at it.

Sam beams at the bloody handprint. Dean has a skittering thought about how it's been too long since Sam's smiled like that, all dimples. Diana scratches the fabric of her yellow raincoat, and it makes a weird sound, _skreet-skreet._

OOO

_From Mercy Weeds's Blog at 08:23 a.m on September 4th. _

_Nothing Green Can Stay_

_Had a vision. Everything goes south starting tonight, 11 30 pm, EST. Look to the skies. Southern skies gone bright as noon and everywhere fire. Fire over sky and fire over water. There's a hospital in Ipswich, and there's man with his skin like a parched desert. In his eyes: brimstone and disease. It's a plague; it starts and it spreads and there's no time. And you become what you're not and lose yourself in collective amnesia, and we prefer to stay ourselves. Nothing green can stay, and hence we must go. _

_We must go. _

_Goodbye._

The warehouse belongs to a shipping and storage company, built in 1940 and abandoned long ago. It's just past a crumbling wharf built over rocks on which the sea shatters itself into foam. From here, the Rocky Point amusement park is visible on another part of the bay, a flaking kaleidoscopic dragon.

Dean sees all of this peripherally as the Impala screeches to a halt in front of the warehouse. Sam is out in milliseconds and Dean follows him, grabbing his shotgun from the dashboard, and it takes both their shoulders to force open the warehouse doors.

There's only silence of the uncomfortable kind and a definite chill, like a cold spot but ten thousand times worse, and the air has the not-quite-stench of dust and buried stories and that changeable olfactory trinity of blood-salt-sea.

A wall of metal boxes sit in front of them, blocking their vision of whatever's beyond, and with one glance at each other, they get to work on it. They make a sizeable hole and then Sam squeezes through, while Dean continues to take out boxes in case they need to make a quicker escape. He can see white from here: many, many lumps of white. Lean closer and he can see the plastic bags around their heads. They're all in rows, all those people, neat rows and columns like an easily computable matrix.

"Jesus," mutters Dean, leaning heavily against the boxes.

Sam takes a few steps forward, and he says nothing. The floor beneath his feet is a labyrinth of symbols: Enochian and Cherokee and Sanskrit and hoodoo, interwoven circles and pentagrams, triangles and hexagons; a magic map. Two more steps, and he looks back at Dean, clearly distressed.

"There must be at least a hundred of them. She wrote the post after they were all dead except for her. What do you think she meant, Dean? A plague? Whatever she saw in her vision was bad enough that they all chose to die. How could anyone—?"

"They're a suicide cult, dying's what they do," says Dean, trying to be steady. He's used to death, but of the explosive, brain-splattering kind. There's something about neat, clean deaths that throws him a little. Nausea flashes in his head, grey green and roiling.

Sam is calling out now. "Hullo? Anyone alive?"

Dean closes his eyes. He has to call the police, he thinks vaguely. _One hundred people dead in a warehouse because they wanted to escape the apocalypse. Maybe they're the lucky ones, officer. Who are we, you ask? Oh, we're the guys who lit the fuse to this mess. _

Fire over sky, fire over water, plague and brimstone and someone in Ipswich with parched skin, and prophesies: Dean feels so tired.

He opens his eyes and watches Sam walk through the gap between the columns, still asking even when he doesn't use the words. _Are you alive? Are you?_

He feels uneasy. Like two eyes aren't enough as there are too many shadows and anything could hide in them.

"Sam," he says. He wants to reach out and yank his brother out of there, but Sam's at the other end of the dead-people-matrix now, unreachable.

"_Sammy," _Dean hisses, not sure why. Maybe because sometimes you're psychic too, when it comes to little brothers and such.

"Yeah, Dean?"

"There's nothing here. Let's go. Someone will get here any second, we don't want to be here when they do."

Sam nods jerkily, but he's barely taken two steps before a man in white steps out from the shadows behind him, silent.

Dean's mind connects the dots instantly—the man has a gun, the safety is off, the barrel is pointing at Sam's head—and he raises his gun, which is a fucking Mag-10 Roadblocker, and this is warning enough for Sam, who ducks.

Dean shoots at the roof near the man's head: a loud, echoing shot that makes the man gasp and cower but not drop his gun, and Sam whirls.

The man sways and blinks, then steadies his aim. "Put your hands in the air! Hands in the air, now!"

"We're here to help," Sam says, pointlessly, raising his hands halfway, "Drop the gun, sir."

Dean climbs through the hole in the wall of boxes, his heart starting to hammer. "Drop the gun!"

"She t-told me you'd c-come!" the man blubbers, and tears are flowing down his face, and obviously Sam's gone all sympathetic and let's-talk-sense-now while Dean just wants crazy-man to—

"_Drop the gun. _NOW."

"She told me who you are! What you did—"

"I said, drop it!"

"—that you started the _apocalypse—"_

Dean shoots again, the bullet whizzing past the man's shoulder just as he intended it to .

"Dean—!"

"She told us what the world was gonna be like, that we couldn't live in a world like that, that we had to _d-die, _but I couldn't, didn't want _you_ finding us—who knows what—I mean, you let the devil out," he laughs and the gun climbs higher, and it's like Dean doesn't even exist, it's like the man's world has tunneled down to him and Sam and the rest of the world is negative space, dark and extinct, and Dean will have to shoot him—

"I didn't want to," says Sam, quietly, "I'm trying to make it right."

"You don't get to say that," the man says, and laughs, hysterical. "You don't get to say _that!"_

Dean anticipates the shot before it comes. So does Sam, who lashes out with his fist, catching the man on his jaw and causing the gun to fire in the wrong direction. Sam grabs the guy's jacket, shaking him once, which is more than enough to make him drop his gun. It clatters to the floor and Sam kicks it away, out of reach.

Dean stumbles to a stop a few steps behind Sam.

"Everything _dies!"_ the man sneers at Sam, who now looks stricken and white, "Everything dies. That's what she saw, that's what Mercy saw. Everything _dies._ How're you gonna atone for _that?_"

There's a flash of a knife and Sam twists away, gritting his teeth.

Dean shoots the man on the shoulder.

He crumples to the ground, shrieking. Blood leaks through his fingers, but there's not too much of it. Sam takes a step toward him and the man shrieks again, a razorshard shatterglass sound, and—

"Shut up! Shut up, you idiot!" Dean yells at him, and then he grabs hold of Sam's jacket, pulling him away, shaking his shoulders to make him look at Dean, "Sam. Sam, did he hurt you?"

Sam shakes his head wildly. "No, it's just a graze—"

"Good, let's go."

"No, no we can't—we shot him— Dean, we've to—"

"We don't have to do anything, he tried to kill you. Let the police deal with him. Move, Sam!"

Sam gives him a slightly dazed look but follows Dean when he walks away.

"What does he mean," he asks, trailing behind while Dean stalks quickly towards the boxes, "everything will die?"

"He's probably just a crackpot idiot, Sam," Dean says, with a hint of warning in his tone. They've to get out of here: that's the first priority. Decoding madman-speak can wait. Two alive among 123 dead is not a good fraction. Especially when they feature on the cult blog.

Dean smells it as they clamber through the hole in the wall of boxes: that chemical scent of strontium and nitrate and sulfur, and one part of him registers that Sam is leaning heavily against the boxes with his eyes closed and his palm pressed against his side (not a graze, then), while the other part thinks _highway flare._

"Sam," he whispers, yanking at his brother's sleeve. "Run. We have to run."

They run, but Sam is at the door of the warehouse when he stumbles, and then he goes down on his knees. Dean doubles back and Sam looks up at him, he says, "I _can't_, Dean," and at that moment Dean is not entirely sure he's talking about the wound in his side and escaping the warehouse.

"Listen to me," Dean says, kneeling himself, every cell in him screaming that there's no time for this, _no time at all,_ Sam better get up right fucking _now_, "The warehouse is going to blow. Right _now. _It's all going to blow up right now and I didn't ice Zachariah and say 'no' to Michael just to be blown to smithereens because of a group of lemmings. And I'm not moving an inch without you. Okay, Sam?"

Sam's eyes meet his, clear and wide. Sometimes they're an iceberg lettuce blue-green and as readable as they were when he was a tiny baby in Dean's arms. He wonders if Sam is feeling the exact same thing, a moment of transcendental familiarity, because Dean can see his resolve strengthening. "Okay," he breathes. "Okay, Dean."

And Dean pulls him to his feet, and they're running towards the wharf, but Dean knows this is far from over. How do you say this in words? Especially because it is abstract and un-concrete, a group of little things that could string together to make something bigger? He knows Sam is crumpling, he can sense it, even when he seems all right. It's a deep-settled unease, bone deep, a darting flickering thing that Dean doesn't want to see but still exists: right there in the corners.

They're both crumpling. _Winding down, _thinks Dean. Like clockwork creatures. Tick, tick tock.

It's the thought that puts the chill in his heart and he wildly grabs for Sam as they reach the edge because—_what if_—and they go over the side.

_Splash._

He's up to his eyeballs in tar-colored water— and it's in his lungs—_stupid_—and the shallow sea-ground is a vista of Del Taco, KFC and Krispy Kreme bags among other things that Dean doesn't want to notice—and he's struggling to come up— his jacket is dragging him down— but he notices the red-white explosion.

It lights even the water gold and red for a moment, limning the ripples above him, like fireworks or flames or the last spark of a hallucinogenic drug.

_Fire over sky, over water._

Dean has salt in his nose and mouth; his eyes are stinging from out all the fucking clichés and nothing would describe this: the heat that even the water can't battle, the pieces of what could be anything landing around them, charred fire-spitting projectiles that hiss and emanate charcoal wisps as they sink to the sea-floor, spinning lost in a jumble of broken time-worn boulders and the layer of detritus.

They break surface at the same time, him and Sam, gasping and ducking from the heat and the pieces of wood and twisted metal that keep dropping into the water like flaming meteors.

"God, Sammy," Dean sputters, gulping down smoke and ash and _breath, _goddamn it, he's got to _breathe,_ and he barely notices that he hasn't let go of Sam the whole time.

OOO

_Fire over sky; fire over water._

_Southern skies gone bright as noon._

Seventy-nine people are killed in vehicular crashes alone because they look up at the sky instead of the road. Those who slept startle awake because the magnitude and splendor of this light is something that worms into your dreams and sets them on fire.

It is 11:30 pm EST. Just as Mercy Weeds predicted.

_Judgment Day,_ they say. _Wait for the trumpets. The Seraphim are here._

Fear is an ice-white curtain that blinds. Not many see the Descent because not many can find strength to get out of bed. Those who do with naked eyes never see anything else.

Somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains, something searing and brilliant crashes into a peat bog and vaporizes a million black-eyed critters that never know what hit them before they pass into oblivion. Nobody documents that. But there is a girl, Susannah Baines, who watches the starfall from her cabin and comes out to look. She looks into the elastic surface of the bog that pops with glittering bubbles, and when the something in it breaks surface and looks her right in the eye, something beautiful and terrible all at once, for a moment she sees the strangest of things. Benevolent skies and agelessness, the birth of stars and the death of them, the slow paths traced by an interstellar explosion, the first amphibian crawling out from roiling long-ago seas. And then she falls backward, clutching at her eyes while they hiss and simmer, screaming over the boiling of her own aqueous humor.

CNN reports _that_, along with half a dozen other strange stories from across the globe. CNN reports Creation Falling as well, and the explosion at Warwick, and there are a hundred shots of Mercy Weeds's website, but no mention of Sam and Dean Winchester.

Around 500 people attest that the one reason they didn't "look up" was because the very last post on Mercy's blog before the Descent was titled, simply, DO NOT LOOK AT THEM DIRECTLY.

Sam posts that at 9:00 pm EST, somewhere near Providence, when he finally manages to hack into the blog. That the Host of Heaven will descend and men cannot behold the Grace they spill over the world.

OOO

They themselves check into a motel somewhere between Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Sam wonders _why._ He asks if the Host of Heaven will look for Lucifer. He asks if they'll come for _him._

"Logical, isn't it?"

Dean hates logic. Logic can go stuff itself while he watches TV. _General Hospital _is on and there's nothing easier to watch while zoning out. He doesn't even know what he's thinking anymore, because everything kind of runs into each other. Sam, maybe. He's always thinking about Sam. Maybe it's kind of a requisite thing the guy upstairs loads into you when He knows you're supposed to be a big brother.

He wishes they didn't have to wait for this thing to happen, that he could talk Sam out of staying up for it, historical moment and whatever hoopla be damned.

"Dean?"

"Yeah, what?"

But Sam doesn't answer him. He doesn't need to, because the lights all go flickering then. The TV flickers as well, warped dialogue and channels all mixing, before it settles into the salt and pepper roar of static.

Sam is at the window, watching. Dean doesn't know what exactly he can see, but if the brightness is any indication, he knows it's not something good. The motel window shatters and Sam flinches back, his hands flying up to take cover from the spray of glittering glass. There's a high-pitched, _dreadful_ sound, and Dean thinks sporadically of last year: last year and the convenience store where he first heard this, this angel ultrasonic frequency, and the room is getting brighter; white, blind-white, and _holy hell, _how is the world going to explain this away?

Sam's fist nearly catches him in the face but then he orients himself and his hand is on Dean's shoulder, and Dean is glad because this is the kind of whiteness that makes you feel alone. White has that effect, you know? It makes the world bigger and the people smaller and farther away, and you're always more alone in white than in black.

Everything is so silent when it stops.

When Dean blinks and the motel room swims back into vision— the golden-orange sheets and the white curtains, the bunny-eared TV, a razor propped against the sliver of mirror visible through the bathroom door—everything is so _still_, like the world's forgotten its voice.

And Dean thinks, for one breathless moment he thinks, _oh God everything is probably dead just like she said,_ but then the screaming: latency spills over and the screaming starts and Sam is saying something—

OOO

—it could have been anything. Let's fill in the blanks and say he said, "Everything's going to change now, isn't it?"

Dean asks, "Would that be right?"

Blue trailer. Yellow raincoat. Hullo, Diana, whoever you are. Hullo, Sam.

"I don't know," Sam says, looking at his laptop. His forehead is scrunched to make tiny anxiety antlers, and he's typing. "I'm kind of busy right now."

"What are you doing?"

"I'm trying to remember who Diana is."

If they both don't remember her, what is she doing here? She's lying on a cozy little divan thing, legs dangling over the side, reading a book. _Keep Trying, _says her T-shirt.

Dean looks out through the window, still with the bloody handprint on it, and watches the dogs. There are a lot of them. He thinks he sees a girl in a lacy dress but he's not quite sure.

"Hey, Sam. Can you see Evangeline?"

Sam looks up and makes a face. "Could you, like, focus for one minute, Dean? We'd be done by now if you didn't keep coming back here. She seems to be waiting for you, your prophet, and you're spinning your wheels and hanging out with _me_. And I'm _you_, or an extension of your guilt, or something fucking Freudian like that, so it's a miracle if all this," he waves at the trailer, "is doing even an iota of good."

"Don't bitch at me, Sam," Dean growls, and looks at the map in front of him, the red pin marking Warwick. " I can't figure out where to go next."

Sam picks up a yellow pin and brings it down with considerable force on the map, nearly ripping through.

"Ipswich, jerk. Aim for Ipswich."

* * *

COMMENTS PLEASE!

Also, Mercy Weeds is a play on the very real Bonnie Nettles. Creation Falling is a play on Heaven's Gate. In 2009, I wrote a story about Mercy Weeds and her girlfriend, both of whom perish believing in the Apocalypse. In 2009 of course, I had no idea about Supernatural, so how Mercy made it into this I don't know. A lot of the tone of this chapter is inspired by what I'm reading, which is as always a Caitlin R Kiernan book, so thank you CRK for writing the kind of stuff you do.  
See ya in Ipswich.


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